NaNoWriMo 2011 - Post Mortem

Now that the craziness of the holidays are mostly over and we come to the part of the year where we're supposed to be contemplative and introspective.  I thought it past time to do my write-up for this year's nano.

In many ways things went better than last year.  I still didn't make it to any of the events though, which was somewhat disheartening.  The local public libraries even got involved, but half their events were on the south side of town where nobody lives.  (At least nobody participating in the local nano forums.)  And not one official event was held anywhere near me.  None of my friends who normally endure nanowrimo with me participated or else they dropped out early in the month so that, once again, I basically had to go it alone.  I even considered dropping out and just doing my own thing, but I guess I'm too stubborn.  Well, that and the five free prints were still an incentive to keep going.

There were a few bright spots however.  Though there were a few rough days where I just couldn't meet goal, for the most part, the writing came easier.  This was the first year (aside from The Ascent where I was basically following an outline written by Xenophon) that I didn't get to the end of the outline before I hit the 50,000 word mark.  I guess I'm getting better at guesstimating my word counts.  The one really fun thing I engaged in this year was a thread on the local forums where we posted the line of the day.  It forced me to sit back and pay attention to my voice.  While each one may not be a gem, exactly, I really think it helped.  I'm starting to feel like a lot of the intangible parts of writing art coming together for me.  I may even post some of those lines on this blog.

I did, however, decide to take a little detour in my writing.  The piece I was working on, is NOT going to be ready by the June deadline for the free print copies.  I decided, instead, to work up a novelette I had done some time back.  I even decided to dust off my much neglected pencils and do some sketches for it.  If you like the idea of zombies in space, this might be a good book for you.

However, now I'm going to have to decide whether to save this story and do part 2 for next year's nano or go ahead with the military science fiction piece I was planning.  Perhaps I'll have a better idea after I finish detailing the remaining scenes, but first, I got a more work to do getting ready for June.