Like many thousands of other people I participated in NaNoWriMo this year with the lofty goal of writing 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. I’m proud to say that I am a winner this year having hit 50,000 words on November 27th. This is my first NaNo win and my third attempt. I guess the third time is actually the charm sometimes. I guess it’s a cliche for a reason

I’m still haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that I’ve written something this long. Last year’s attempt never made it to the 45k mark and I did work on it some throughout the year. I think this year worked much better for me for a few reasons.

1) I had a good idea where I wanted the story to end up before I started writing. It kept my driving forward in a way that writing by the seat of my pants never could.

2) I made very good use of the local NaNo community in Tucson. I went to multiple write-ins every week. I posted on the forums, and in the Tucson NaNo Facebook group, despite my hatred for FB.

3) I used the attendance of write-ins as an incentive. I would not go to a write-in unless I made at least 75% of my writing goal for the day. It meant that write-ins were just fun social time for me and helped me meet and get to know some great people.

4) I refused to let myself settle for less words than my goal. I took two days off from NaNo, but they were on purpose. I also made sure that I was ahead of the goal count to so that I wasn’t getting behind by not writing.

So, those are the ways I managed to bang out more words on one story in a month than I’ve ever written before. Now the question is, can I keep it going? I’ve set a goal for myself to write 1300 words per day which rounds out to about 40,000 words a month depending on its length. That should hopefully allow me to finish up this novel (50k isn’t nearly the end) and move on to something else with the beginning of the new year.

What this all means is that I’m now officially putting on my big boy writer pants and going after my dreams of being a published author. I think 30 sounds like a good age to get a contract signed, don’t you?