Re-Evaluating The Purpose of NaNo (& GIFS)

Hello, guys!

So, I recently joined a group on YWP NaNo called The Super Awesome Writing Club. Its been giving me lots of motivation to write/edit. So I sat down at my computer, opened the NaNo writing program, and stared at my 30K words…

of pure crap.

That’s right, you read that correctly. This is how I turned 30K words into a still shrinking 9K.

I wrote two stories during NaNo. I decided to focus on one called (title in progress) Behind Locker Doors: Middle School Exposed.

…Basically. Why not put my crazy friends to use?

So that already put me down to about 18K.

I was all: “Hey, not too shabby for half of my NaNo WC!”

Happy go lucky-ily,  I replaced all my NaNo rambling chapters with the edited chapters, for a grand total of…

6 freakin K.

So I added back in the unedited, in progress chapters… 9K. Just 9K! I was astonished and surprised. What happened to my words of pure gold? I lost half of my word count. Which brings us to the post…

As many of you know, this was my first NaNo. In the middle of the November, I got depressed over the election.

But… but… it’s true, I swear! I had a bad Diposition on everything. My Whole world outlook changed!

Until I snapped myself out of at and stopped acting like a brat. Now, this was around tthe last week and a half. With many marathons and sprints, and even writing 8K in a day…

((but seriously. OMG I WROTE 8K IN A DAY!!!))

I completed my (lowered) goal with 90 minutes to spare.

However, I was in a major time crunch for those 12 days.

So crunched, in fact, I had my character go off on a tangent in the middle of a arguement about the quality of our school’s chocolate milk… a 750 word tangent. And there were many of these…

The 750 words added up and up and up, and left me with what I have here today.

Yep, it’s true. See, I approached NaNo with the idea that all I needed to do was reach my word count goal. I wrote scenes upon scenes that were pointless and I knew I’d need to delete later. Because in my mind, words were good. The actual words didn’t have to be good, but in general, anything to up my word count was fine in my book. Right?

Wrong.

 

And I haven’t even mentioned all the typos that should’ve been fixed after the writing of each chapter. I blew it off, thinking I’d know what I’d written. But now i have whole paragraphs that I can’t even begin to edit because I have to go through and try to understand my rambling WITH the spelling errors.

Now, I have loads of extra work. I now have tons more editing to do then I would have if i had jsut listened to me. It’s really dimmed my excitement about winning, cause it almost feels like I didn’t win right. I feel like I fell short of what I know I am capable of.

Additionally, in this time I could have been using to re-write my lost words, I have to at least do some preliminary editing on my manuscript for fear all the red and green lines will hurt my pupils.

 

My WordCount

 

Anyways, I should probab;y get back to editing… AND MY 6 MONTH BLOGIVERSARY SURPRISE!

Thta’s right, in two days, I’ll have been blogging for half a year. I’ll give you a hint: it’s something you’ve missed… (hopefully, anyways. XD)

peacing out,

april