NaNo Reflection

NaNo is officially over again ;o; While I'm sad to let go of the month, I'm very happy with how November went for me, and I'm excited for what December's gonna bring! (And not just Christmas, either. Though that is a big part of it.) 

EDIT 12/6/15: I found another blogger who posted a NaNo reflection! I really like reading about other people's writing, so if that's the same for you guys, check out The Quiet People's post! 

For NaNo this year, I decided to work on a story I had previously only written a few thousand words for. Aperture helped me win the past two years, but this year I wanted to work on a story I would honestly consider publishing traditionally.

(That's a long story, and maybe I'll make a blog post about it in the near future.)

Anyway, I chose Casanova and I stuck with it!

Well, for the most part, anyway. Around the 10th I learned that Miraculous Ladybug, a show I had been waiting for since at least last year, had finally started airing. And as a children's show based around magical kids, I got a lot of good ideas ... for Aperture.

I knew I couldn't quit writing Aperture for an entire month, so I decided back in October that I would let myself write for it but not include it in my NaNo word counts -- I mean, it's definitely not Casanova, so I felt it was cheating to include Aperture. Counting only Casanova meant I actually had to work on Casanova.

My theory didn't quite work like I wanted it to, but it worked nonetheless! Around the middle of the month I slacked off on Casanova, but once I had written Aperture and ML out of my system, I made myself focus.

I used my Computer Science skills to make myself a nifty Excel spreadsheet c: (We used Excel for, like, a week in class. I'm amazed that I managed to rig it up the way I did, making it do math for me and everything.) The blue bars are for Casanova, and the red bars are for Aperture. 

Surprisingly, I only worked on Aperture for 8 days! I was sure I was going to work on it a lot more than that. I think I definitely needed the creative break from Aperture this month. Everything I wrote in November I considered AU / otherwise not canon to the story I've been working on. 

I'm not sure how to really explain the 28th. It was mainly because I was so close to winning that I wouldn't go to bed until I had hit 50,000 words. I wrote 4,155 words the 28th alone. It's not quite as impressive as the 8k I wrote on Nov 30th back in 2013, but hey, it looks cool on the chart. My second most impressive day was the 7th, aka #doubleUpDay. 

This year was the first time I could participate in Double Up Day, and I'm glad I did! I donated under both my name and a friend's so we'd both get donator halos, and I received some cool sponsor goodies B) I'm saving the sticker for something special (my next writing notebook, probably), but I'm hoping to put the bracelet and bookmark to good use. 

In hindsight, I should have done some more pre-writing and planning. The ideas I had for Casanova only lasted me so long, so a lot of my writing for the month was straight-up dialogue or scenes I improvised completely. I owe a lot to Chris for taking me out driving to various places "for writing research", and also letting me try to talk through the plot out loud. 

I skipped three days of writing for Casanova. Two of the days I took off from writing completely because I had no down time, and one of the days I focused on Aperture and didn't push myself to do Casanova at all. My final word count for Casanova was 51,055 and my total for the month including Aperture was 61,213. November was definitely my most productive writing month so far! I looked back at my notes and most months average around 25k. 

My official NaNo chart looks like this!

I'm gonna have a post coming up soon that focuses more on Casanova itself and what I figured out about it over the course of the month. If anybody else did NaNo, I'd love to hear how your November went!