NANOWRIMO UPDATE 3: Victory!!!

Nanowrimo 2010 is COMPLETE! Well for me, for thousands of writers, tomorrow is D -day. I 'm very happy to have finished today. The winners screen and the access to this cool winner badges made it all worth It!! This year Nanowrimo got more press attention than last years , which was my first. There seemed to be a lot of negative  comments flying around about the process and thankfully a lot of support from the online writing community. Is my novel complete? No but the journey of Nanowrimo teaches you a lot about the literary process and about yourself. Here are some things I learned about myself:

1) How I approached Nano reflects, how I approach my Life:

This is only my second year doing Nano but I noticed a pattern this year in how I approached my goals. In the beginning I was very excited about the project, I had my outline, my daily word goal, notebooks and pens. This lasted all of  4 days. Then as the hard work began and the luster of the process wore off I began to procrastinate. Luckily my desire to succeed overcame this tendency. I sacrificed reading, going to the movies and even hanging out with friends. My willpower overrode my capacity to self sabotage my self.

2) I'm Human & I'm Competitive

The support of the online community and the Nanowrimo site is incredible. Their were weekly email  pep talks from established authors, In person meet ups, buddy lists and the tremendous writing community on Twitter who welcomes us writing hopeful year after year under the hash tag #amwriting. So there is a lot of people talking about there work and there progress.

The second week in I noticed my self feeling envious about others progress. There were people who had written almost 30,000 words in 12 days!! I began to despair, question myself, and even felt myself having snarky thoughts about these "braggers"  But they weren't bragging, they were just fellow writers who were just at different stages in the process. I worked through it and I'll admit to just a "tad" bit of smugness when I finished today.

3) In The End, it's just me and my computer

As I mentioned the online support for Nano is incredible and my fellow bloggers who took this challenge were tremendously supportive.  It was also wonderful to hear all the other participants talk about how wonderfully supportive their husbands, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, roommates etc. were to them. I thought many times how wonderful that support is and how different the process might have been for me If  I had a partner supporting me.

As time went on though it became apparent to me that  no matter what support system you have , at the end of the day its  just you and your desire to succeed. The challenge was with my internal self. I had to decide to  sit down every day and plot out the story develop characters and shut off my inner critic . Now that it's over I feel relief, joy and also a strong desire to keep writing. that is the best gift Nano gives to me every year!

Date Finished 11/29/10 2;00 pm

Total word count: 50,617