I think I might just be getting the hang of this.
Wowza! Has it really been 25 days and 50,000+ words? The calendar and my personal NaNoWriMo page say yes.
This was my second year participating in National Novel Writing Month (my first year was 2015 I think) and I couldn't be happier with how it worked out. Obviously a person doesn't need an official movement to set a daily writing goal for a month and stick to it, but both years I've found that it's really helped me to know thousands of other folks are out there trying to achieve the same goal, to follow their challenges and successes on Twitter, to see others' word counts slowly but steadily growing and cheering them on. On days when the brain was maybe a little bit, "Look, we don't have to write today, I'm tired/busy/uninspired," NaNo empowered me to respond, "You know, everyone else out there is finding the time and energy to bust out 1-2K words today, there's no reason we can't do it too."
Both years I've participated, NaNo came at just the right time: I had a nicely fleshed-out idea and a basic outline, but was feeling hesitant about getting started. Personally, I think I am much better at the revisions/editing/tinkering/refining parts than I am at just puking out thousands and thousands of words in order to have something on the page to revise/edit/tinker with at all. This is why I find NaNo so useful for that just-get-the-terrible-first-draft-on-paper phase: It comes with a built-in goal, and a certain amount of positive peer pressure and accountability that helped motivate me to write, a lot, even on days when I didn't have a lot of time or energy or internal motivation or was feeling stuck about where to go next.
No, 50,000 words is not a novel by the standards of most categories; there are definitely still many, many more words to write, and months of editing/revising/refining/baring my soul to critique partners and beta readers. However, it is a pretty significant chunk of words, and going from 50,000 words to 80-100,000 is a lot less intimidating than looking at a blank screen and a blinking cursor and catastrophizing about how the hell you're going to get to 80-100,000 from ZERO words.
So, once again, THANK YOU #NANO for helping me put my head down and get it done!
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