NaNoWriMo Done? Or Just the Beginning?
December, what a let down. It’s just eggnog and tinsel and dreidels now. Gone is the heady rush of November’s National Novel Writing Month! Are you having a tough time pivoting into the “joyous” holiday season? Do you wish the rule was do a word sprint if you find yourself beneath the mistletoe? Have you silently renamed the reindeer after your favorite authors? Now Dashiell, Now Faulkner! Now Christie and Dickens! On Carroll, On Kafka On Doyle and Grisham!
Maybe you freakin’ WON NaNoWriMo with your stunningly crafted 50,000 or more words? (There’s been a crazeeee club among us who do a 50,000k Weekend over Thanksgiving!) Maybe you didn’t write all but you darn sure wrote some! I am proud of my halfsies finish. If NaNo is a marathon I wrote for 13 miles. I pantsed it all the way, too, discovering stupefying revelations about my characters and their world.
Maybe you didn’t write all but you darn sure wrote some!
For instance, I killed the wrong person. That’s right. I realized it in one of those whammo shower cognitions, soap in my armpit, that I axed an old man when I should’ve bumped off a young woman. Woopsie! I fixed it — someone has been resurrected (Welcome back Rabbi Desuvio “El Mensch” Hernandez!) and someone else, well, she shouldn’t have told her best friend about the map. C’est la vie of me.
There’s no way I can stop now that I’ve got this momentum. November 30 might be the last official day of NaNoWriMo, but for me December 1 is just another day of write, reflect, reach for Oreos, repeat.
What about you? Are you gonna give your carpal tunneled hands a break or are you powering through? Are you hoping your writing group won’t mind reading 50,000 words this week? Does your agent expect 150-ish pages every Kwanzaa? Is it time to crawl out of your subterranean NaNo bunker and greet your family for the first time since Daylight Savings started?
Whatever you did, whichever quantity or quality, however planner or pantser, pen and paper or laptop, on your bed or on a park bench, YOU DID IT. Especially this year of all years when everyday life became an intense psychodrama full of shocking plot twists and relentless suspense. How’d it feel to be a character someone else was writing? Horrible right? So be kind to your characters this Christmas. Just kidding — give ’em the works!
Oy, this NaNo was definitely one for the books, heh. See you on the bestseller list!
Stephanie
❤ NaNoWriMo Board Member since 2019, participant since 2011 ❤
Please consider donating to NaNoWriMo on Giving Tuesday. Just $25 lends novel-writing support to two community centers. And $50 provides three classroom kits to educators in high-need schools. Thank you!
