A productive sort of failure. · 2:29am Dec 1st, 2017
WELP.
In case you hadn't been paying attention, I went ahead and gave National Write a Novel Month a go this year, as I do most years.
And, as I do most years, I failed. Womp womp.
But, silver lining is, I made it further this year than I have in a long while, so that's something! Just a little over 41,000 words. Technically I could try writing the next 9k over the next four hours, but I certainly can't write that fast-- and I'm gonna go be bad and drink beers and be social after I finish this blog post.
50,000 words is a somewhat skinny word count for a modern novel, it's worth noting. It's just an arbitrary point, and I'm sure those grapes were sour anyway.
Proooobably didn't help that I changed gears mid way through. See, I wrote about 23,000 words about a pair of time-traveling siblings (and their dog) getting into various kinds of trouble. The problem was, I let things get a little too weird and too crazy (for example, Elvis Presley was the President of the City at the End of Time). The disconnect from the 'normal' world just made it harder and harder to make things work.
So I changed tack, and just started writing stuff just to write stuff. Including ...
Some random blog post/book review type stuff.
The very beginnings of no less than two pony fics-- one Flash Sentry Papers, and the other EQG based. Might return to them later.
About 10,000 words on a 'superhero noir' project I've tinkered around with before-- which I'm actually planning on continuing for a bit as part of my ongoing pipe dream of getting some original fiction published. And now that I'm thinking about it I'm already coming up with ways to refine the premise (giving the hero a sidekick to play off of, for one. That, and it might make things easier if one of the characters wasn't precognitive).
Oh, and around 2300 words of a gratuitous sex scene that has nothing to do with any of the actual plots I talked about above. Like, Harlequin-paperback level smut. Which I will in all likelihood delete before anyone else can read it. Not that anyone on FiMfic would want to, anyway. It's about people doin' it, and not ponies (or dragons or anonymouses or whatever the hell else is in the Featured box today no I'm not mad what are you talking about).
Ehehm. So yeah. While I fell short of the mark (far short, depending on the criteria), NaNoWriMo at least got me writing on a regular basis, so that's something, right? Hell, if I'm lucky, I'll continue on the same trajectory I did last year. I mean, a year ago, I started working on The Prisoner of Zebra when I had run into a brick wall on that year's NaNoWriMo project, and since then, I hammered out over 85,000(!) words in four different installments of The Flash Sentry Papers, which are more or less 'original' fiction in that I made up my own characterizations for the central characters, plunking them down into magical ponyland for various hijinks. So, y'know, in 2018, maybe I'll get as much written without that crutch?
In any case, I'm just feeling kinda tired after a long (if unsuccessful) journey, so I figured I'd share and stuff. But stay tuned! I'm hoping to have some Hearth's Warming Eve-fic silliness written out in the next few weeks!
It'll have Trixie in it. Folks like her, right?
Hey, you doubled my count, and that's not bad. Hang in there.
So...
Gota link to that 2k amount of smut you created?
you could just use glim glam and Trixie for it and it'll rain hotcackes.
Sounds productive!
Really, failing at NaNo is not failure as such. Like you say, the whole point is to get you to write, more than you'd normally do, and if you don't hit the (relatively arbitrary) finish line, that's okay.