Skip to main content

NaNoWriMo Conclusion

This is just to let you all (if you didn't already) that I suck. I utterly, completely, and fully failed at NaNoWriMo.

13,155 out of 50,000. 26%. A miserable low "F." 438 words average per day.

What a horrible attempt. Now, if you included all my revision work, emails, lesson plans, and all that, I'm probably pretty close to that 50,000 words. But I didn't because that is stuff I do every day, and NaNo feels like (to me) it's supposed to be something "special" or extra.

However, I did get more consistent in my writing. I have a hard time waking up early in the morning, but I did that more often than I have recently.

So maybe it wasn't a total bust after all?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

K12 Teaching in 2020

Today I drove home from work with my rock music blasting at higher decibels than, I'm sure, was healthy. But I needed a heavy beat loud enough to feel it vibrate in my chest. I'm not a drinker, but if I were, today would be a three-glasses-of-wine day. And there's no specific reason. Except that I'm only a month into the school year, and I'm already exhausted. And I'm not alone. All you parents out there who are concerned about the style, quality, amount or any other qualifier of education your child is receiving this year, I can guarantee you that an entire team of teachers, administrators, and support staff is just as worried. We're doing our damnedest to meet your (and our!) expectations. Right now, I'm barely keeping my head above the water line. I am the kind of personality who plans things out. I visualize my dive into the deep end, consider all possible complications, and then perform a smooth breaststroke from one side to the next before any of t...

The Perfect Ending to a Perfect Story (Hopefully)

We've invested a lot of time and energy into writing the perfect story, only to be faced with creating the perfect ending. We want our conflict wrapped up with a nice, neat bow, but we don't want to cheat our readers. My prime example of this faux pas is the Hunger Games series. I loved about 2 1/2 books of this series, and was furious at the last half of the 3rd book. Suzanne Collins broke every promise she had made to her reader, and she broke many of the beginning rules of writing. I'll try not to spoil the story for those of you who haven't read it yet, and if you haven't read the series, you should...at least as a case study. But basically, Collins wrote her character into a corner (which is good practice, by the way), and then gave up trying to find a logical, believable way to get that character out of the corner (which is NOT a good practice). Plus her main character did not actively solve the conflict driving the entire series, and the difficulties in th...

Thinking Like a Writer

I met a gentleman a few weeks ago who gave me a great definition of a writer vs. an author. He said an author is a writer who has been published. Under that definition we are all writers. We all write, whether it is emails, grocery lists, blogs, poetry, novels, memos, etc. But we don't all consider ourselves writers. I have dabbled in poetry and a few other things for many of my growing-up years. But I have only recently begun to consider myself a writer (see my short essay " i am a writer "). So what made the difference? I did! When talking to my husband the other day, I realized the difference between most of us and those who consider themselves writers: it is all about how we think...literally. The difference for me occurred when I started thinking about my writing. I used to write for assignments mostly, but not for myself very often. I started really writing for myself with my first novel, Market Murder . I started trying to figure out how to make things work. ...