It's over...

And just like that, NaNoWriMo comes to an end.


Alright, it was yesterday that it ended.  I was pretty wiped out from the final sprint to the finish (almost 8000 words) and didn't have much energy for blogging afterwards.


So how did it go?


Well, I met my personal goal of 80,000K.  Unfortunately, it was not all the original story.  You might recall I reached 50,000 about a week early, and decided to pick up a second novel.  I ended up writing a mystery/Lovecraftian horror thing that's approximately 1/3 finished at about 23,000 words.  I may go back and try to finish it in January, but it was pretty fun to write.


There is a long editing road ahead of me.  I'm actually looking forward to it.  I plan to read - A Lot - in December, and maybe work on some chapters for the novel I abandoned at the start of NaNoWriMo.


In January, I plan to re-read the draft and start making notes for the rewrite.  There will be a long rewrite, but I'm hoping to have it done by March.


Why March, you say?  Well, March is National Novel Editing Month (you guessed it... NaNoEdMo), in which writers commit to 50 hours of editing time over 31 days.  Less glamorous (and probably less attended) than NaNoWriMo.  But I think it will be fun.


Negatives from NaNoWriMo 2010

• I had hoped to write every day, and that just didn't happen.  There were about 4 days out of the month where i did no writing at all, and a few more where I did small amounts.
• My story is less a first draft and more an extended outline.  It needs a lot of work.
• I had a hard time balancing life, work, and NaNoWriMo this month.  I had a lot less things competing for my attention last November, and was really able to hide myself in the writing.  Not so, now.

Positives from NaNoWriMo 2010

• I reached my goal.
• I had a good time at the writeins (though I missed the Laurel Panera group from last year)
• I hosted writeins! Yay!
• There were some days I forced myself to write and broke through the 'I don't feel like it' barrier
• I came up with a few ideas for novels I'd like to develop in the future - including that historical fiction.
• I had a really, really good time.

Overall, Maryland had 388 WriMos finish out of 2841 signed up.  MD WriMos wrote 38,009,732 words (22,883 avg, including non-finishers.) - 6th out of all 540 regions in the NaNoWriMo Word Count scoreboard. Maryland WriMos truly are an awesome group of people.  Check out the article I wrote about them for the Columbia Patch.

This year, I also participated in a Word War Challenge with MD versus Texas/Austin-Houston (Blue Crabs vs. Lushguins).  The Blue Crab team averaged 45,017.711, but the Lushguins kept ahead with an awesome finish with 58,829.475 words.  Great job everyone!

I'd like to thank everyone for their support.  Erinn put up a lot of encouragement on her blog, Something Else to Distract Me.  My writing buddies, old and new, sent messages throughout the month.  The NaNoWriMo community was really active on Twitter, which was also an encouragement.

There's talk of monthly writeins among the HoCo WriMos, just to get together and continue writing.  Hope that will happen!  Until then... I'm going to go read.  Happy December everyone, TGIO!