I emerge after a month of clacking computer keys and realize that, while I wrote 50,000 words, I still haven’t finished my novel draft. No matter—I’m “over the hump” and am confident that I’ll finish by the end of December. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but if I hadn’t leveraged NaNoWriMo in November, I’d be much further behind, so thank you NNWM. I hope others in the NNWM frenzy have had good experiences, too.
I also did something I didn’t expect—I signed up for two NNWM online groups, one locally, but one that gathers in my original home town—Dundee, Scotland. I suddenly got curious about how another place in another country managed the month-long process. They were fantastic. There were tons of tips for everything from keeping writing to avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome. The organizers were terrific. As for my local online group, they were far less active, but I was also more involved with other writers face-to-face here, so perhaps I missed something. Regardless, it’s been an interesting experience. I don’t know if I’ll do it every year, but I’ll certainly do it again when I need to create a lengthy draft. As many others have found, I got swept up in the camaraderie of it all, the deadline, the word count, the whole experience. May all our drafts be good ones.
Image Credit: http://sevenels.net/typewriters/rems.htm
Note on the image: This is a picture of the make-and-model typewriter that my Dad was given during the war and had to carry with him wherever he went, usually on the back of a motorcycle. He kept it well into the 1980s. The platen was so narrow, he had to fold a business-sized envelope to fit into the typewriter if he wanted to type an address.
