Why I Went Against My Own NaNoWriMo Advice
And why I’ll probably do it again.
I am not going to “win” NaNoWriMo this year.
If you know me, you probably know me for my most popular article, where I talk about how to get through NaNoWriMo and succeed at it. But here’s the kicker: I didn’t take my own advice.
Granted, I did spend ten days away from technology completely (which is an entirely different article on its own), which was going to set me back no matter what, but I encountered another problem: my story wasn’t meant to be 50,000 words.
I hadn’t known this until this morning, when I realized there was no possible way I was going to reach 50,000 words. I was at a solid 37,000, and had woken up today with the goal of reaching 40k.
Needless to say, this didn’t happen.
I finished my NaNoWriMo at just under 40k words, and I was happy with that.
Even if I’d just preached about writing every day (I didn’t), not editing (I did), and not slowing down (I definitely slowed down), I was still happy with how everything turned out.
So why did I go against my own advice? Why didn’t I push through these last couple days and work as hard as possible to crank out my final 13,000 words?