Fuzzled Like A Fuzzly Thing - November's End

Wow! It's December! Can you believe it? I can't. The year has gone so unbelievably incredibly fast that it's almost too much to contemplate. So today that means we're due for a November wrap-up :)

I do apologise for my lack of posting on Friday and my late posting today. The last five days have been made of sheer insanity, what with training new people at work, spending a day making gingerbread houses, engagement parties, birthday parties, bridal showers and so on and so forth.

The good news is it's all over and everything went well, huzzah :)

So, back to November and the Ultimate Question: Did I, or did I not, win Nano?

A theoretically simple question, with a complicated maybe-maybe not answer. How can it be complicated, you ask? Well, it goes like this.

In November, I wrote 50,894 words. Of that:

* 1528 were on Hunter Hunted;
* 49332 were on HNOT; and
* 34 were on Jess. Yes, 34. That's right :P

Soooo. We can look at this in three ways.

1) The total word count for November is 50k+. Win.

2) The November wordcount for HNOT is less than 50k. Lose.

3) I actually wrote 686 words of HNOT before November; the total wordcount for HNOT is 50k+. Win.


Personally, I decided that the extra words in 1) made up for the false addition of words in 3), and entered HNOT for a win :D I squeaked in with (according to their count) 3 words and 5 minutes to spare, after an insanely busy day wherein I did a whole bunch of stuff plus wrote nearly 4700 words - my biggest day ever!



I do hope you all don't think too badly of me because of this :D hehe. To celebrate, I did a wordle of the manuscript so far.

So, what did I learn from the process this time around? Mostly that 1600 words a day is really Not That Bad any more. This time, I mostly didn't struggle at all to keep up with the wordcount (though having 2 days off per week helps; mind you, I had that in '07 as well). The first time I did NaNo the word count nearly killed me; I was writing an average of 175 words a day in 2007, peaking at 391 words/day in May.

This year, I'm averaging 376 words/day, peaking in September with 667/day. In effect I'm writing double what I was two years ago on average - which is actually quite a nice thing to know. Huh. *pleased* :o)

Aside from sheer wordiness, this NaNo has been a really squeeful experience for me in terms of writing progress. For the first time ever, a novel is flowing properly for me, and it's been absolutely fun to write. I always knew writing a novel was supposed to be fun; but now I know how that feels. Thanks to techniques I learned in How To Think Sideways and learning to really listen to my characters and let them direct the plot rather than forcing them into a mould, the book has been practically devoid of middle-of-the-book blues, and interesting things keep happening. It's all terribly, terribly exciting! :D

Where to from here? In December I hope to finish HNOT (another 20-30k required) and also pick up HH again, which I haven't touched since November 8. I'd really like to finish it this month if I can, and given it only needs another 5k-ish, that should be do-able.

Also, I'm taking Holly Lisle's How To Revise Your Novel course, so I plan on working through that with Jesscapades :) Who knows? Maybe this time next year I'll have not only 4 complete novel drafts (TBAEO, my first nano; Jesscapades; HNOT, this year's novel; plus a draft for next year), I might have two edited drafts, too! (Jess & HNOT) Fingers crossed, and here's hoping :o)

So. How was your month? If you entered NaNo, did you win? What was the most exciting thing you learned? And what do you plan to do in December?