I lost NaNoWriMo, but I’m happy!
It’s been a while since I have posted anything, but not for lack of having things to post about. It’s simply that I have been working on a million projects at once as usual. As you may know, NaNoWriMo comes every year in the month of November. The challenge is to write a novel of at least 50,00 words in one month. You have from the 1st of November until the 30th and you have to come out with a complete novel to win. Despite the fact that it sounds crazy, it’s perfectly doable if you are dedicated to doing it. In fact, I was way ahead on my word count all the way through the 15th. By that point, however, I had also started a blog, joined a band, and started writing an ambitious Facebook application.
Before November, I was in a bit of a slump. I don’t mean that things were going all that badly for me or anything. I just wasn’t doing much. I would go to work and then come back home and watch episodes of South Park on my computer or play a video game or read interesting articles on the Internet or some such thing. Not all of it was completely useless, but I wasn’t really getting anything done. On a whim, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo on the 1st of November. I woke up with a hangover and was groggily checking my email when I read the mail from them. I had signed up the year before but didn’t even start, but they had my email address for that reason. I just decided to give it a shot and started on the novel immediately.
I realized something. It was sometimes difficult, but I cranked out over 2,000 words a day regardless. It jump-started me into doing things again. That’s when I realized that writing a novel wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing. I took stock of what I really did want to be doing and decided to do it. I started this blog because I realized that there are so many thing that I think of expounding upon every day and I don’t have anywhere to expound upon them. I knew that some of the things would be useless drivel, but some of it might be something I would want to go back and read some day, and some of it might even be something that somebody else might want to read. It’s all well and good to think things, but when you write them down, you end up exploring them much more fully in the process. So I started it and found that having someplace to get out all the ideas and thoughts went even further toward pressing me forward to accomplish things again.
Even though I am not going to have a 50,000 word novel at the end of November, I am going to have a 30,000 word half a novel, a new music project, a Facebook application which is going to be really cool, and a blog. All in all, I think it has been a good month. I’d recommend NaNoWriMo to anyone. Actually, you don’t really need NaNoWriMo. Just pick any random thing and just decide on an arbitrary goal which is difficult yet possible and go at it. You might be surprised what else comes of it even when you don’t succeed.