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Dec. 16th, 2008 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjmarloweThis is a procrastination post. Believe me, I know and acknowledge this, and as soon as I'm finished it I promise I'm going back to writing and/or work. But it's also something that I wanted to talk about at the time but was unfortunately more or less LJ-less outside of work.
I finished my eighth Nanowrimo on December 1 (or rather, I participated in my eighth; I actually only completed my seventh) and I'm not sure how I feel about it. The thing is, is that I know that I can write fifty thousand words in a month. In fact, I can do it in much less than a month. But the cameraderie of November is something I really enjoy, so I've been coming up with other ways to challenge myself. This year I was trying to write two projects; one fannish and one original. (I've never written anything fannish for Nanowrimo before so that was actually the new part for me.) This was, in the end, probably the wrong direction to take with it; I did exceed fifty thousand by a substantial margin, but I didn't reach the full hundred, and the projects definitely didn't proceed equally. The fannish project passed fifty thousand individually; the other didn't even come close.
The real problem, and probably the source of my dissatisfaction, was that neither of them was finished. And looking back, that's often a point that I reach at the end of November, where the word count isn't the hard part, it's finishing a project that is. Thus, my goal for next year is born: worry less about word count - I know I can and will write long enough - and worry more about managing to actually complete a project.
Then December came along and I started full speed ahead on my Yuletide story (and believe me when I say there's an epic making-of story to go with it, too, which will have to wait till January) so I put both projects on hold until the new year. So I have about sixty thousand words of a Supernatural 'Jess lives' story - which, aside from the occasionally flabby writing that comes of consciously trying to make a daily word count, I actually love - that I really want to finish and do something with.
So despite my dissatisfaction with the journey this year, at least I got something to look forward to out of it. :)
I finished my eighth Nanowrimo on December 1 (or rather, I participated in my eighth; I actually only completed my seventh) and I'm not sure how I feel about it. The thing is, is that I know that I can write fifty thousand words in a month. In fact, I can do it in much less than a month. But the cameraderie of November is something I really enjoy, so I've been coming up with other ways to challenge myself. This year I was trying to write two projects; one fannish and one original. (I've never written anything fannish for Nanowrimo before so that was actually the new part for me.) This was, in the end, probably the wrong direction to take with it; I did exceed fifty thousand by a substantial margin, but I didn't reach the full hundred, and the projects definitely didn't proceed equally. The fannish project passed fifty thousand individually; the other didn't even come close.
The real problem, and probably the source of my dissatisfaction, was that neither of them was finished. And looking back, that's often a point that I reach at the end of November, where the word count isn't the hard part, it's finishing a project that is. Thus, my goal for next year is born: worry less about word count - I know I can and will write long enough - and worry more about managing to actually complete a project.
Then December came along and I started full speed ahead on my Yuletide story (and believe me when I say there's an epic making-of story to go with it, too, which will have to wait till January) so I put both projects on hold until the new year. So I have about sixty thousand words of a Supernatural 'Jess lives' story - which, aside from the occasionally flabby writing that comes of consciously trying to make a daily word count, I actually love - that I really want to finish and do something with.
So despite my dissatisfaction with the journey this year, at least I got something to look forward to out of it. :)
