December 1st, thirty days after Nanowrimo 2010, and I’m pumped about the fact that I was able to finish with time to spare. My count was 61K+ by November 30th evening. Its pretty obvious that the thing is unreadable as is, but it’s still a lot of words, and words can be massaged and edited. I’m lucky that I decided to use an outline I had been preparing for a while. I can see now that working cold from scratch could lead to major problems. I suspect that many Nanowrimo writers crash and burn because there’s nothing to fall back on to when the idea’s dry up. Funnily enough, I found that a number of scenes that I had sketched out proved to be unnecessary or redundant and many others simply telescoped into one another. Whether this is simply a function of the plot itself or my personal writing style will remain to be seen when I get to the editing stage. All in all, there’s a lot to be said for the write or die approach mandated by Nanowrimo. It definitely got me started on a project I had been toying around with for a long time but was simply too lazy (or terrified) to start. In the long run, it’s what you get down on paper (or a computer file) rather than what you carry around in your head. Definitely a positive experience for me and one I plan to repeat next year. Spend three-quarters of the year researching and fleshing out an outline. Come November start banging it out and you come out at the end of the year with a good start. I’m about a third of the way through the project I started but it was ambitious to begin with. Probably why I procrastinated for so long with it anyway. Next time, I’ll streamline the plot and hope to get further into the meat of the story.