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Gosh! Yesterday evening, I actually completed the NaNoWriMo challenge after writing 51k words on several stories. I’m probably more surprised than anyone else. I didn’t think it could be done, particularly not when I realised that I would have to write about 2k words every day in order to finish it.

But it worked out a lot better than I anticipated. Mostly because:

1. I don’t have time for anything else besides writing
2. When you postpone the editing, you don’t stop to ask ‘is this crap?’ every few hours
3. Even if I have no idea what to write, I can still see sentences that are missing when I look at what I’ve already written
4. Writing becomes a habit after a few days. Even on workdays, I’ve sometimes managed to put down 3k words, something I would never have tried considered possible
5. If you write just a little every day, it suddenly becomes 50k words
6. Since this was my first attempt, I decided to divide my writing between several stories and not just one big story
7. All the stories I’ve written are usable (even if they are only on a first-draft level), so it has saved me months of writing if I had used my normal pace

That said, I’m glad it’s over because now I have so many stories that need editing, I will probably spend the next 6 months editing what I’m done this November.

Still, I can heartily recommend giving it a try. This was a major eye-opener for me, and I’m already considering joining the NaNoWriMo Camp in April and set my target as: “Write another 50k words on any story”. That would be something, eh?

It’s so much fun when you discover something new that works, isn’t it? I feel so happy about discovering this organization.