It's true - I have a Nano hangover.
First of all, yes indeed - I made it. 50,461 words. The last few days were rough ones, but I muddled my way through it and I can count myself among the winners of nanowrimo once again. No need to hold your applause. I will quietly wait and gracefully accept your accolades....
Now, then... The hangover. It seems like the two times that I have successfully completed the fifty thousand word count, I have been utterly defeated at the end of the month; just no interest in writing (or reading, really anything to do with literary pursuit whatsoever...). There's something about that daily deadline that just leaves me wanting to run away a bit at the end of November. And therefore, that is why I haven't updated my blog before today (well, that and a whole lot of other craziness that no one probably wants to hear about...)
An odd thing happened a couple of days ago, though. I opened a word document and I started to free write. Without a deadline. Without shooting for a word count that I could brag or moan about. Those of you that have been reading my (increasingly boring, I imagine) blog posts about Nanowrimo will perhaps remember that my whole point in undergoing the process this year was a grand attempt to get the creative juices flowing. I'm going to go ahead and tentatively say that it was a success.
The first harsh edit of my 50,000 word document chopped it down to just over 26,000 words. That sounds pretty awful, but it was honestly more than I had thought would remain. I'm sure that it won't all lead to pieces that remain viable, but the fact that I have several new stories to play with (and quite a few bits of poetry) is definitely a nice starting point to be stuck at.
Not too much else as far as news these days. Swimming in quite a few rejections this month - must be a lot of places trying to clear through their backlog before the end of the year. Have had a couple of fiction acceptances (and my first non-fiction acceptance), though. Nothing I can talk about quite yet, but some possible good news on the fiction front.
It's interesting that my prose acceptance rate is running so much higher than my poetry acceptance rate over the last year. I'm thinking tentatively of running an end of the year blog post with some numbers, though I'm not sure that would be all that interesting to readers other than myself...
Oh well... I am past Nanowrimo for the year. And maybe starting to get past the Nano hangover. Time to revise and rethink where I'm submitting some of my poetry apparently.
I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but I may give that a shot this year. Apparently, I work better under a deadline...
