November is over.  NaNoWriMo has officially ended.  Whew!  With yesterday’s effort, I finished just shy of 53,000 words for the month.  While I made the NaNoWriMo word count, I came up short on the goal of finishing the draft of my novel.  I think I have about 15,000 words to go, which puts finishing it by the end of the year in jeopardy because I also have several short stories awaiting final editing before I can submit them, and I can’t realistically keep the daily NaNoWriMo pace for another month.  Getting those short stories out is a high priority for m.  This creates a real conundrum, especially when finishing the novel was one of my writing goals for 2011.

While I ponder my options, here’s my final NaNoWriMo tally sheet:

Nov 22—1,907 words
Nov 23—1,727 words
Nov 24—2,334 words
Nov 25—1,811 words
Nov 26—1,767 words
Nov 27—2,226 words
Nov 28—1,288 words
Nov 29—1,750 words
Nov 30—1,794 words
Week 4 (+2 days)—16,604 words
Final Total—52,968 words

Whether you’ve met the 50,000-word goal or not, congratulations to everyone who took up the NaNoWriMo challenge this year.  I doubt most of what was written will ever see publication (and probably shouldn’t), but I don’t see that as the benefit of NaNoWriMo.  I believe the real benefit is the motivation it provides people to sit down and write a story.  Everyone has a story to tell; so few every try to write it.