NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 29

• Writing Time: 00:45
• Session Word Count: 972
• Total Word Count: 50110 (48333 par)

I had a light session today to hit my 50,000 words. Success!

Purely in terms of hitting my word count every day, NaNoWriMo 2023 felt pretty good. Some days were certainly easier than others, but I only missed my quota on a single day, and my strategy of writing a little extra each day meant that I never fell behind and I was able to finish a day early. Now I can spend the final hours of November doing some wrap-up and jotting down notes for the next time I work on this project—because it’s definitely not done, and I’m going to set it aside for now.

The story itself feels like a mixed bag, but that’s generally how I feel about any work in progress. This one will definitely be a rougher first draft than Razor Mountain, because I went into it with less of an outline and followed a few tangents that may or may not make it into the final product. I do feel like I was able to discover a few important elements of the story that will become important, so I feel good about that.

Blogging through every single day of NaNoWriMo was surprisingly fun. I didn’t exactly plan to do it, but once I started, it felt right to keep going. It never really felt like an extra burden, and it was nice to talk about what I was working on. Somehow, even though I’ve been reflecting on the writing process in this blog for several years, I’m still caught by surprise when it ends up being useful.

It helped that these were easy entries to write. They were much shorter than my usual posts and completely off the cuff. I was honestly surprised by how many people came back most days to read them. If you’re one of those people, leave a comment and let me know what you thought.

This was the most posts I’ve written in a month by a huge margin, but don’t expect me to keep it up. Next month I’m going back to my usual style of fewer, slightly longer posts.