Nanowrimo wrap up

It is past the end of November, and if I had done my WordPress updates, my original post might not have gotten eaten two days ago. But such is life. And this life is trying to figure out what to do now. This was the easiest NNWM that I have ever participated in, for two reasons, I think. First, I decided to not try to create an original work, but to spend the month as a rebel and write thirty days worth of essays on thirty-ish different topics. It was definitely easier to take it in bite size pieces that had a defined edge than to dredge something out of the back of my brain. This leads me to believe that if I ever do want to actually get some writing done, I will need to plan a bit more that I usually do. Second, having this defined plan took some of the mystery out of it. I didn’t need to think of topics, they were decided. And there was no intention to anything with this, I just felt some internal pressure to empty the brain from all the thoughts. I added a layer of introspection to it to keep it from being a stream of consciousness dump. The idea that it didn’t have to “be” anything in the end was liberating. This experience told me that the previous years when I fought to get the words down, despite claiming that it was a throwaway work, it actually wasn’t on some level. That I wanted something to become of it.

So going forward, I will take that for what it is. I already miss not typing on the train every night. So I will see if that can become some sort of habit. In the mean time, I might review what I have written to see what I can distill and see if I want to plan for a fiction project for next year.