NaNoWriMo: Done

NaNoWriMo is done for another year!  Woo hoo!  I mean darn!   I mean yay!  I mean aww shucky rootbeer float!

Mixed emotions are overflowing here.

So, remember that post two days ago? You know, the one on November 29th where I said "*yawn* I can do it, but I don't think I will, because I don't really care enough."  Well, not those exact words, but close, anyway.  Yeah, I did say that.  Right smack in the middle of the day before the final day of NaNo, I threw in the towel.

Unfortunately--well, or fortunately, I suppose--my blog posts are shared on my web site automatically, and a couple of my fans/readers/friends/coolashellpeeps said "Oh, no you don't."  They poked me, and to be honest it didn't take much to get my writerly engine going again. 

Hey, when it comes to writing prose, I'm a cheap date, so to speak.

So yeah, I put 3K words onto the 6K words I'd already written that day, and added another 10K words on November 30th, and poof, I became a Winner.  A rather sore-fingered Winner, but a Winner nonetheless.

I still don't really care.  I got a cool graphic.  Woo hoo!  The prize I really wanted for winning was the cool discount on Scrivener, but since I already got that and bought the software when I won in 2012, this one is--pointless.

Well, no, it's really not pointless, come to think on it.  I did get a draft done, sort of.  I mean, it's not done.  It's a solid story behind all the writing, and it's going to be well over 50K words when I label the draft as actually done.  In fact, it's going to be well over double that, and likely triple that.  So, yeah, I still have a lot of prose to fill in. 

But you know what?  It's started.  It's ended, too.  The skeleton of the plot is there, and all the people are there.  The hard part's done, so yay!  Go, NaNo!

A good friend (who, admittedly, I've never met, and it's just as likely we'd hate each other if we did, but hey, he's a guy whose blog posts I like) wrote a post lining out exactly how I feel about it, and what to do about that as well.  I'm not gonna repeat it, of course, in part because you're here to read my writing, not his, and also because I'm scared he could send his penmonkeys out after me for copyright infringement, or something. 

Anyway, go read it here:  Chuck Wendig's beautiful but NSFW piece on why NaNoWriMo doesn't matter  

(I do have to quote one line of his: "Because now it’s NaEdYoShi month — National Edit Your Shit Month."  Isn't that beautiful?  Brought a tear to my eye, it did.)

Now, once you're done with that, here was my response in one of the NaNo groups I'm in:  

I--I gotta stop for a while, man. No, not stop writing, I mean stop drafting. I have 2007's NaNoLoser, 2012's NaNoWiener, 2013's NaNoWiener, and now 2014's NaNoWiener, in addition to two other drafts, sitting on my stinking hard drive (yes, and backed up in Google Docs) waiting on my tender slash-and-crash revision love. Even Scrivener is looking at me like "you better slow down, man."

So, yeah.  The reason I've only put out one book this year is that I've written and revised and worked on other projects, but you can plan on this spring bringing two, if not three or four, new Stephen H. King novels to market.  

Yay!

Anyway, for those who just won NaNo--congrats!  For those who didn't make it to 50K words--congrats!  'Cause, right now, what matters is that you wrote something in November.  Awesome work, all!

- TOSK