With the end of December nearly upon me, I figured I needed to revisit November.  I never had a chance to close out my NaNoWriMo month because I hopped on plane December 1st, and immediately things got very busy.

So how did I do?  I had planned to write a novella during NaNoWriMo, but another trip, this time in early November, threw a wrench into the gears.  I forgot to bring my novella notes and outline with me, so for the first ten days of November, I couldn’t work on it.  Instead I decided to finish the novel I had started during the previous NaNoWriMo (2012), but which went astray in the third part and was stuck in the mud.  I’m happy to say that I found my way and finished the first draft, while at the same time continuing to make progress, albeit slowly, on revising my other novel.  I hit my word target on top of that, so November was a good month, even if I didn’t use it to meet some of my other goals (e.g., write a novella) as  I had planned.

For those keeping track, here’s what I accomplished over the last ten days of the month:

Nov 21—1,836 words
Nov 22—1,868 words
Nov 23—856 words
Nov 24—1,738 words
Nov 25—2,289 words
Nov 26—990 words
Nov 27—1,769 words
Nov 28—1,1467 words
Nov 29—1,981 words
Nov 30—1,802 words

Last Third—16,596 words
Total words—50,674 words

Whew!  It would have been nice to get 326 more words for an even 51K, but I’m not going to quibble.  That’s a lot of words no matter how you look at it, and more importantly I finished the novel and feel good about the first draft.  It needs a lot of editing, but the hardest part for me is done.

I feel good about what I’ve accomplished.

I hope others who did NaNoWriMo met their goal.  If not, don’t worry; NaNoWriMo isn’t a measure of anything, really.  As long as you put butt-in-chair and wrote, you succeeded.  Now the trick is to keep it up.  Good luck to all for the rest of this year and into the next.