My 2007 NaNoWriMo Novel? Fail

Yes, I have failed NaNoWriMo this year. Yes, I know that about two weeks ago I posted that I was determined not to fail this year. And I quote:

This year I told myself that I would finish no matter what. If I couldn’t stand my story, I’d just end it and start something else in the middle of the novel — who knows how, just flashback or flash forward to something else — to get myself to finish.

Yes, I’m a quitter. I gave up just a few days after that post, actually. Thanksgiving was what did me in this year. Before I left town for Thanksgiving I had about 25,000 words written, and I was about 7,000 words behind where I should have been for that point in November.

My handy Excel spreadsheet for Nano said that if I wrote 2,430 words a day for the rest of the month, I’d still reach 50,000 and be a winner. That didn’t sound too hard, that’s less than an hour a day.

Of course, real life interfered. I had grand visions of getting some writing done over Thanksgiving while I was staying at my parents’ house, but it just didn’t happen. I just didn’t have the time to crack open the laptop and put some words onto the hard drive. When I got back home that Sunday, I still only had 25,000 words, which meant I was now 16,000 words behind schedule. I’d need to write almost 5,000 words a day for the rest of the month to make it.

At that point I decided it was all over and there was no reason to drag out the pain any longer. I could have squeezed out another 5000 words pretty easily — and possibly even stretched it to 10,000 — but no more than that. And since what I was writing was so incredibly crappy to begin with, there really wasn’t any point to it.

Out of curiosity, I recorded the word counts on the handful of sites that I post other random junk on (like this one) at the beginning and end of November. I was curious to see how many words I had written in other places that weren’t helping my NaNoWriMo word count at all. The answer was roughly 12,000 words to various blogs in November. I’m not sure how it got to be so many, but there you have it. I was curious to see if maybe I was writing a huge chunk of a Nano novel informally like that, and if I just made my novel a collection of random Internet posts, would I win after all? The answer, it turns out, is no. I would still have lost.

Oh well. Maybe 2008 will be my year. I have a few ideas based on what worked well this year and what didn’t work, so maybe the Gods of Fast and Crappy Novels will be smiling on me next year. And maybe they’ll cancel Thanksgiving so we can all get some more writing time in.