NaNoWriMo Done!

I know that I had posted that I finished NaNo on the 18th. And yes, technically I did so by attaining my 50k of words. But I decided to go farther this year. The best I have ever done is 96k in one month and that was writing in March of 2003, I believe. That was one novel that came from a script that I had written with a friend in high school for a creative writing course. I thought that there could be so much more to the story and therefore, decided to give it a shot. After that, I found out about NaNo from a friend and decided to give it a try. I have loved it ever since and participate, if not win, every year since. It is an accepted thing in my family now that I am only partly available during the month of November.

Well, this year, I wanted to push myself. So I doubled the goal. I wanted to write 100k by the end of the month. And I did it. Despite all of the setbacks and distractions, by afternoon of Nov. 30th, I had over 100k. My total validated by the NaNo program was 101322. That is a personal milestone for me as the most I have ever done for NaNo, the most I have ever written in one month and the most written in one month for one single story. The only other time I came close to that was when our computer was down and I ended up hand writing 92k during the month of August, 2006.

The best part about this is that at the end of each year, I set goals for myself for the next year of writing. When I first took up writing again after marrying and moving with my husband to the States, I thought it was amazing to write 50k in a year, let alone a month. The yearly totals in goal have slowly and steadily moved up through the year and I am pleased to say that last year I was able to reach half a million words written. And that was with plenty of time not writing due to my husband taking over the computer when he was sidelined by an on the job injury. There was even less time for me to write this year due to a lot of complications and commitments. But with this NaNo total, I am well back on track to hitting 500k by December 31st.

Next year, I'm going for a million.