NaNoFail?

This year, I set out to do National Novel Writing Month for the first time in most of a decade. I’d won NaNo six times between 2005 and 2011, and then hadn’t really tried again since. Oh, I had made halfhearted attempts to use that NaNo energy to finish a partial novel or edit a draft, but I’d never come close to the wordcount and the free abandon of my six 50,000-word drafts. (No, none of them are available on Amazon. Because, that’s why.) So I really wanted to prove to myself that I still had the chops.

Then Real Life hit. It wasn’t entirely unpredictable. In fact, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. I was out of town the first weekend, then back to work without a break. Then I started some new meds that gave me horrible insomnia for a week (a known side effect, so that wasn’t even a surprise). By the time I caught up on sleep from all of that, the month was half over.

It’s not that I wasn’t writing. I took my laptop with me on the weekend trip and squeaked out a few hundred words each day. I came home and every day, even through the insomnia, I would put down another few hundred words.

But for NaNo, you need to write 1,666 words every day for a month. If you miss one day, every other day requires more words.

So I kept thinking that my daily wordcount would pick up after I got home…after I got deeper into the story and caught my writing momentum…after I caught up on sleep… It never did, and midway through the month, I realized I was too far behind to catch up. I kept writing, a few hundred words, one day on top of another, until the last few days of November. But I knew I wasn’t going to win.

I finished the month just shy of 13,000 words, a quarter of NaNo pace, and five chapters into a brand-new fantasy novel.

I think it’s a solid beginning. The rest of the novel needs more planning before I can go on, but I like what I’ve written so far–it’s a perfectly serviceable first draft with some really fun bits in it. It’s also more first-draft words than I’ve written in a month in…quite a while. I managed 26 straight days of writing. And I got to hang out online with my writer friends a lot, while we all cheered each other on. (A lot of them won. I’m not jealous…okay, a teeny bit.)

So was it a fail? Well…yes and no. It wasn’t what I wanted, and it’s tough not to feel disappointed. But if I can finish this draft in 2020, I’m calling it a win.