#NaNoWriMo Update – or – Why It’s Not Bad To Come Up Short

Well, it’s 22:19 on the 28th.  I’m just about to hit 30,000 words for the month.

Not bad.

But…not good enough for NaNoWriMo.  Of course, I’ve got some more writing in me tonight, so I’ll probably get to 31,000 or so today.  With two days to go I could still get to 50,000.  If I didn’t have to go in to work or take care of the family.  So I’ll probably end up with around 35,000 words for the month.  Respectable, but it means I’ll be batting .500 for NaNo.

And that’s ok.

I realized a week and a half or so ago, when I didn’t write for several days straight on account of doing fun things with the family, that I wasn’t going to make it this year.  Oh well, no big deal.  The main point of NaNo for me, this time, was to get myself back into the habit of writing, since between the move, adjusting to San Diego and the new job, and the new kid’s arrival, I didn’t write much at all over the summer and early fall.  And from that perspective, NaNo has been a total success.

35,000 words, divided up into a 16,600 word novelette, the completion of a second mid-teens novelette (which I started last month and am finishing up now), a 9,000 word novelette, and the start of a fourth short story which may just turn into a novelette before I’m done with it since that’s what seems to happen more often than not, lately.  Not too bad a showing for a month’s work.

So that’s that.

So…what’s next?

I’ve been thinking a lot about goals for 2013.  So I’ll be fleshing those out a bit and making preparations to track them in better detail than I did this year.  And I’ve got a few stories to send to markets and/or publish in December.   That’ll eat up the first week of the month, probably.  Then it’s back to Pericles.  I really need to hunker down and finish that thing up.  If I can do in December what I’ve done in November, I think I can do that, too.  Worst case, I’ll finish it up in January.  Then comes the big question: pub it or send it on the query-go-round.  I’ve been pondering sending it out to editors as sort of a challenge to see what happens.  But that does seem like a total pain in the butt, with very limited prospect for success or even positive feedback.  *shrug*  We’ll see.  First thing is to finish the damn thing.

And then it’ll be time to assess 2012 and move on to 2013.

I’ve got great things in mind for this next year.  More to follow on that topic in a bit.  But for now, it’s back to that novelette.

Cheers!