I won NaNoWriMo this year. I've never done that before.
Truth be told, I've never even come close. In 2013, I started planning a story but didn't commit any words to the page before turning my spare attention back to school work. In 2015, I got about about 13% of the way towards a reduced goal before losing focus. Since then, I've had to much on my plate to even naively think that I could complete.
Having now made the time commitment to write 50,000 words in the course of a month, I can say that I was right to wait. It's possible to accomplish a lot in the course of a month with a few hours every day, but during undergrad I certainly didn't have that many extra hours to spare. As a graduate, though, the equation in a little different.
My novel is nowhere near finished, but it's satisfying to have gotten so far into a fiction-writing project. As it turns out, my past attempts have been suffering, at least in part, from analysis-paralysis. My desire to plan out the story in intricate detail interferes with my ability to just sit down and put words on the page. Niven's 17th Law.
From here on out, my plan is to write about a thousand words per day, without worrying about it if I happen to fall behind one day. If I can keep that up, I'll be at 80,000 words by the end of the year. Whether the book will be done at that point is an entirely separate question. Once it is, I can start revising the draft in the direction of something publishable. I don't know if I'd ever want to publish this, but that's a matter for another day.
