I nearly doubled my word count from 23,410 to 45,036 in week four, and then finished with 50,115 on day 29. While I did end up winning, I would certainly not recommend an exponential approach to anyone (doubling words week over week). It's too stressful! My best day of writing this year was when I had the house to myself all day and I did word sprint after word sprint on Facebook, netting 8,447 words in one day.
Now that it's done I can look back on it and make a few observations. The first is that going into the month with nothing of a story and no outline makes the writing process much more difficult. I didn't paint myself into a corner too often, but there were enough times where I just didn't know what was going to happen next and the story ended up sitting still for days at a time until I became inspired again.
And here for historical purposes is my graph from this year. It's a little inaccurate because there was a problem with it on the 15th or so. I actually reached 15,000 a day before it shows here. When word count is everything, things like that can be very distracting!
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| 2011 NaNoWriMo Word Count by Day for theicemage |
I am not crazy about the ending and am likely to change what I came up with during November in favor of something that gives a lot more closure and more of a full life cycle for the characters. And I say that meaning the story I tell in this should cover the birth to death cycle of the characters. They're fairies, and they basically live one year at a time. For more details than that, you'd have to read my story (when I make it available).
And now to get back to other projects that were put on hold to make time for writing, like translating the Visual Basic simulation for OrcSports.com into C# so I can get the site running again.
