The title is a testament to my inability to think of a proper title for this, and the fact that I'm listening to a song by that title right now. Anyways.
I realized that I started this blog for NaNo in general, then subsequently forgot about it while I was doing NaNo this year. But I've been thinking over the last nine days since this year's event ended (and I won) about what it was like, and how it was different, and all that jazz.
For one, I could tell that in the year that had passed, I had lost a lot of my feel for the world. I decided to do a sequel, which was probably a terrible idea, but I was scrambling for ideas and that seemed to be the easiest. But then I wrote most of it off the top of my head (which is never a great plan...) and at least half of the novel was written on the weekends, madly typing after a week of having to go to work, do homework, and otherwise participate in the outside world. Most of it will probably be cut if I ever get the courage up to edit the thing. And whether or not I will put the editing effort into a story that I never really connected to, or developed in any way that would make it worth reading at all.
So I think what I'm really saying is, it will be unlikely that anyone will ever read this year's NaNo, because I already know that it's bad, and I don't need other people to tell me what I already know. If that makes sense.
On the other hand, I did have a blast this year, thanks to my new region. Last year, obviously I was in the East Bay region, and while I had a great time there, especially with the people at the Fremont Write-In. But SacNaNo has a special place in my heart now, thanks greatly to being able to interact with people outside of physical write-ins (and while at physical write-ins, for that matter) on the IRC channel. Whoever decided to set that up was freaking brilliant. Seriously. It was probably the only reason I made myself keep writing all month long. Otherwise, knowing myself, as soon as I hit the brick wall (which happened unusually fast, because of the aforementioned suckiness of the novel...), I would have totally just been like "AHH! Life and stuff!! Kthxbai." And stopped writing for the month. Instead, I hung out on there and got tons of encouragement from other people in my region who I otherwise wouldn't have gotten to know, because Sacramento is a seriously FAR FLUNG region. There's no way to hang out with all the people in person. But on the IRC, I got to know people from all over, and participated in enough word wars to drag my word count just barely over 50K by the end of the month. And when I did, there were people there, cheering virtually, which was definitely more epic than when I won last year and was just hanging out at home cheering for myself.
The plus side of this whole experience, aside from the social aspect, was that I think I may finally have broken through the issue where I couldn't write anything of worth because so much crap had built up in my mind. Like, I was actually starting to think of things to write about that were interesting and that I might be able to do something with. Part of it was hanging out with and talking to people who have a similarly literary mindset. That always helps. Part of it was just finally getting 50,000 words of crap out in one fell swoop so that I could actually think about these more worthy things. Whatever it was, I'm super excited. I just need to take advantage of it while I've still got it, and do my darndest to not lose it again. We can only hope...
