NaNoWriMo update: I am the Champion!

I did it! I slayed the word dragon!

This victory is a little bittersweet, though. While I achieved the goal, and wrote 50k words in 30 days, I am still nowhere close to having finished this novel. I’d estimate that I have at least another 25k to write.

I could keep writing, but I thought I’d take a little pause to reflect first. And, while I’m paused, I did a little word count analysis, because I’m a geek.

Here’s what I discovered…

You will likely be unsurprised to hear that I am an inconsistent writer, but when I do write, I WRITE.

• Of the 30 days in November, I wrote on only 21 of them (70%)
• Of those 21 writing days, I only achieved the minimum word count goal of 1667 words or better on 15 of those 21 days

So that means that on those 15 days I didn’t just write the minimum daily word count goal. No. Because I wasn’t meeting the minimum word count goal *every day*, in order to finish on time, I had to write closer to 3000 words on those 15 days. The max I did in one day was over 6.3k! (That was on that one day of 1k sprints I did last weekend.)

What can we learn from this? For starters, trying to get me to write a consistent number of words every day is probably a non-starter. I actually like having days in between to just sort of stew on my story. I also like to procrastinate. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. I should revise my writing goals to take this into account…

I also thought it might be interesting to figure out how much writing I managed to squeeze in on “workdays”… It turns out that (again, unsurprisingly…) I did most of my writing on weekends and holidays.

• There were 18 “workdays” (non-holiday weekdays) in November.
• I managed to write on 10 of those 18 days (56%)
• And, out of those 10 days, I only achieved the minimum daily word count goal on 5 days (50%)

So, I’d say that writing on weekdays is not really something that works well for me… Definitely something to keep in mind for future projects.

I’ve already started reflecting on my 2014 goals and I’ve come to realize that I was totally over-ambitious when I created my 2014 writing goals. So, I’m trying to be more realistic about what I should be able to accomplish next year. More on this in a future post… but just something I’m starting to think about as we wrap up 2014.

For now, I’m just going to celebrate that I actually managed to pull this off in a ridiculously busy November!

Hooray! Time for more chocolate! And maybe a walk… if I can remember how to use my legs…