I first discovered NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) back in 2013, thanks to one of my FAVORITE authors, Marissa Meyer. She had a challenge up called the Write Like Crazy NaNoWriMo Challenge, where she challenged others to write more words than her that year. Her word count was kept a secret until the end, so you just had to write as much as you could and hope that you beat her word count. So I signed up and wrote as much as I could. I ended up winning that first year with a total of 72,179 words. I hadn't finished the story I was working on but I was so excited that I won. I didn't beat Marissa Meyer, but I still won NaNoWriMo and I hadn't felt so good about writing as I did that month.
I have "participated" the other years too, 2014, 2015, 2016. But I didn't win. I didn't even come close. I started but life kept getting in the way and I wasn't as devoted to the stories I was trying to work on as I was that first time.
Then 2017 came, and I decided at the beginning of October that this was my year. Then life happened and the middle to end of October was hard. In the sadness that consumed me, I told my husband "I can't do it this year, I just don't have it in me." But then on October 31st, I created my book. I knew that no matter how sad I was, I needed to not stop doing the things I wanted to do. To not put my life on hold. So I decided I was going to write as much as I could and not really worry about winning, since every word I wrote in November was going to be more than I thought I could do.
This year my story was similar to the story I was writing in 2013 in some aspects, but at the same time completely different. But it was a story that I was really excited about. I started out hopeful, which is pretty easy when you meet or at least get close to that first day goal of 1,667 words. But as the days went by there were times I didn't write at all. November is a pretty busy month for me, between a day off for a school holiday and an entire week off from school for Fall Break, we have Thanksgiving, and my birthday. So there were a lot of days where I barely wrote anything or just didn't write at all.
Not one day was I on target or ahead for reaching 50,000 words this year.
But I kept reminding myself, that each word written was more than I was going to do so that is still a win. I honestly figured I wasn't going to win this year.
As of November 27th, I had only written 25,849 words. Which meant that if I wanted to win I had to write 24,151 words in three days. Which wasn't something that couldn't be done, it could, but it is quite hard.
For those three days I hardly did anything else in my free time but write.
And I did it, I ended up with 50,435 words by 10:30 pm on November 30th.
I kind of still can't believe that I wrote that many words in only three days, but it was something I really wanted to do and I worked really hard to reach it. Below I am including a screenshot of my Stats page from the website, it has a graph showing the words written by day. I am also going to share my daily word count at the end of this post for anyone that is interested.
I didn't actually finish writing my story this year in those 50,435 words, so it is going to be something I am going to continue to work on and who knows maybe after finishing and rewriting I will start to think it is a story worth having someone else read one day.
Words Written By Day
Day 1: 1,422 Day 16: 1,016
Day 2: 1,225 Day 17: 3,741
Day 3: 1,898 Day 18: 2,312
Day 4: 414 Day 19: 1,005
Day 5: 32 Day 20: 114
Day 6: 31 Day 21: 2,215
Day 7: 2,992 Day 22: 123
Day 8: 0 Day 23: 49
Day 9: 0 Day 24: 0
Day 10: 2,402 Day 25: 0
Day 11: 2,302 Day 26: 0
Day 12: 1,866 Day 27: 0
Day 13: 0 Day 28: 6,822
Day 14: 690 Day 29: 8,495
Day 15: 0 Day 30: 9,269
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