My NaNoWriMo challenge is complete, word count officially validated! Cue horns!! Cue bagpipes!! Cue all the kazoos!!! This is my third attempt at NaNoWriMo and my first ever win. What has changed since the other two efforts? From my perspective, I’ve just kept at it, hacking away (hopefully in just one sense of the verb, but possibly more than one) until I started to have some momentum. I went to the Viable Paradise Workshop, the Out of Excuses Writing Retreat, and then this summer, the NASA of writing workshops: Odyssey. Over time I’ve come to agree more and more with Stephen King: word count matters. You might write a lot more crap with a daily word quota, but you’ll probably write more good stuff, too. And that’s good to remember today as my bulked-up inner editor (who pays a lot of the bills around these parts) shakes her head at the amount of work that remains. I know I can revise, and now I know that this snail can successfully run a winning race. So, in conclusion, I think, I daresay, I might just be able to whip this thing into shape for readers by mid 2018.
Woooohooooo! Thanks for reading and for all your support, everybody! Please excuse me while I go have a gluten-free victory beer.
