I like to view NaNoWriMo partly as a challenge, partly as a measuring stick. Even if someone is unable to win, whether it be because they learned about it too late or fell behind, it’s important to keep writing until the very end.
The way I see it, writing more than usual is the best kind of practice and routine we can do for ourselves. Most people don’t write, and those who do struggle to write very much. If all someone does during NaNoWriMo is 20,000 words, that’s amazing. That’s nearly half a novel or even a complete novella. Hell, it’s a couple of short stories most definitely.
This is the first year I’m actually going to complete NaNoWriMo and validate my project. To remind everyone in how I uniquely use NaNoWriMo, I use nearly everything related to my authorship and books into my word count. That does include these blog posts you’ve been reading, because a blog is one of the most significant tools for an author to maintain in this digital age.
I worked on multiple novellas and novels as well, adding to them and finishing a few in the process.
I don’t include Google+ posts or Twitter or anything like that. It would be dumb to collect those couple of extra, although just as important, words to the collective. Some people don’t view that as legitimate, and if that’s how they feel, I won’t deny them. In my defense, when I did a post a day on my blog for NaNoWriMo, I brought in over 2,000 views a month for the following year. I cracked over 25,000 total views a little over a month ago, and this year I’m exceeding 5,000 views in a single month.
That’s some serious mileage out of a blog, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from first publishing in 2013, it’s that the most difficult part of the process is getting people to read your work. No one is owed attention and shit doesn’t just happen.
It’s why I view everything I do as an author to be just as important as writing words into a manuscript. To be fair, I would feel incredibly guilty if the majority of my word count wasn’t for books. I am incredibly proud of the amount of work put into my novels and novellas this month, and an excited to start sharing them with everyone next year.
My first NaNoWriMo was 14,000. My second NaNoWriMo was 17,000. My third NaNoWriMo was 27,000. And this time I’m hitting the 50,000 mark.
Keep at it. Every word matters. You matter.