My word count for the final week was 1400 on the novel and 1600 on the novelette. That's kind of lackluster for a final push but there were a couple days where I wasn't able to get much if anything written. Tuesday I went to Seattle for the launch of Jim Butcher's new book, Cold Days. The drive time meant that I didn't get much done on Tuesday and the subsequent road trip hangover made it near impossible to get anything done Wednesday.
Now, I know some of you are wondering if I reached my goal?
No. I didn't. But I got pretty darn close. Out of the 13 K I wanted to do on the novelette I wrote 8513. On the Novel I did 8281 of the 10K I set for myself. So out of the combined 23K I managed 16,794 words. I think that being a little over 6K from the finish line was respectable. Especially since my calendar looked like this:
(Why yes, that is a Schlock Mercenary calendar.)
Add a 40 hour work week on top of that and yeah, that's a lot of commitments for any given month. But for NaNo it borders on the insane since, as I mentioned before, a few of those commitments took me as far as Seattle.
So what did I learn this year?
Two NaNo projects is CRAZY!!! Yeah, I am not doing that again. I'm not going to stop bopping between projects the rest of the year -- it helps me clear my brain -- I'm just not going to do it during NaNo. I do have to admit that there was one good thing about doing two projects. Normally I get burned out on the book about halfway through the month. Last year I actually resented the fact that I couldn't take a break from the novel without losing precious time. That was one of the reasons I did two projects this year and while I didn't feel any of that resentment this year, I did have to continually readjust my brain for the different styles of the two stories. The protagonist's voices in each story are very different so I had to give myself time to push one out of my mind and pull up the other. If I spaced it out (worked on one in the morning and the other in the evening) it wasn't so bad but it still took a toll. I think it wore me out faster.
The other lesson I learned from this year's NaNo was that if I know my schedule is going to be that busy (like I did this year) than I'm going to postpone NaNo until December or January so I can focus on it more. I'm determined to make goal one of these years. As Hero Boy would say, "I will succeed!" And one day I will.
Oh yes, I will.
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