I'm a NaNoWriMo Winner!

Thank you to all my friends and family for putting up with me again this year during the harrowing month of writing in November! Many of you accurately recalled which questions were on the ASK and DO NOT ASK lists, and when you asked about it I enjoyed boring you with details about how I wasn't doing it conventionally this year, but I was writing, and it was all crap, etc, etc. It is a blessing to have supportive friends like you to keep me remembering to take myself seriously!

This year I think I forgot how hard it is to write so much in so short a time-frame. I have been writing more consistently all year so I thought I would be warmed up and ready to go. Even doing it unconventionally (as in not just one single story), I still lagged behind in word count until the last week.

This year during NaNoWriMo I think I learned that all writing is going to feel crappy, unless it doesn't, in which case it is probably crap. No, that's not it. I relearned to turn off my internal editor and see what comes out unfiltered. I learned that sometimes I think up kind of boring stuff. I learned that I'm a fairly fast typer. I sort of knew that, and I still totally hit the backspace key a ton, but I can really crank out the words if I have something to say.

I also learned that I am still an incorrigible speller with a vocabulary list larger than the set of words I can occasionally accurately spell (both 'incorrigible' and 'occasionally' being on that list). I will type something out thinking it looks perfectly sensible with the vowels I have chosen, but then I get the telltale red squiggly line that tells me I am wrong. Some document programs offer me suggestions, but sometimes I have to keep trying until I get it right, or go to Google, which is generally quite good at figuring out my spelling faux pas. (You know I took French, but I'm not sure how to pluralize 'faux pas'. Maybe I shall Google that… Ah, spelled the same, but pronounced differently. Pronounced such that people would think you'd made it up, but you really knew and were correct.)

Now that all this deadlined writing is over, I think I'm going to have to take it easy in December to attend to my long list of other hobbies which hopefully include cleaning, washing dishes, and doing the laundry, as well as crafting, baking, and shopping.