NaNoWriMo Winner?

The month of crazy (aka NaNoWriMo) is over. I took the challenge at the beginning of November thinking I had no chance of reaching the 50,000 word finish line, but I had a lot of other goals in mind. I wanted to get a good start to my novel, I wanted to learn to turn the inner critic off long enough to pound out a few thousand words, I wanted to get in the habit of writing a lot daily, and I wanted to remember how to have fun with my writing again, having spent the last year or so editing more than writing.

I had a blast writing this past month. My storyline took off in directions I hadn't considered at the start; ditto for complications that arose. I learned to write at the computer (I've always written long-hand before--but no time with this challenge) which increased my writing speed, and I fully practiced what I preach about squeezing writing in every spare moment. And the only way I could even come close to hitting the word count was to completely ignore the inner critic/editor and just let loose.

So I hit my goals--I was a NaNo winner in my books long before my word count was validated by the evil NaNo computer (evil because it knocked 500 words off my original, barely over the finish line submission), but I was still stupidly happy to reach the word-count goal as well. What can I say? I'm a competitive person and I find it hard to leave a challenge unfinished.

The problem is that by the end of it all, I was focused strictly on the word count, and that had never been what it was about. I wasn't even having fun anymore. I was stressed and half-panicked that time was running out and I was 500 words short (courtesy of the evil NaNo computer). James over at Men With Pens puts the whole thing into perspective with his post Did You Reach Your NaNoWriMo goal?

So . . . would I do it again? Probably not. I plan to take what I learned from this experience and carry it through my writing from here on in. Am I glad I did it this time? Absolutely.