I didn’t post much about this year’s WriMo. After last year’s horrid experience which resulted in my first win but in my complete dissatisfaction at what I wrote where normally I fail but am happy with my writing, I wasn’t 100% sure I would play.
But I did, and after waffling between a couple ideas, I picked one and ran with it.
This year’s major hurdle was a lack of planning. Not on purpose. You see, I was planning pretty well for Idea A and then I ran into a snag. A huge central element of my story turned out to not be feasible. So I could either A) write it anyway and fix it later, B) spend the first week or so of November fixing it and start way behind, or C) go with Idea B. I chose option C.
With my second idea planned only half-assedly, I jumped in. Things were going well to start but my lack of an outline began to show and I stalled out around 10,000 words. I needed to break and fix my outline so I knew where I was headed. I took a couple days off and did that. I wrote a little each day, very little, and about a week later I’d finished the outline and got back to real writing. Only now I’d lost my momentum and my passion for the project. I’ve continued piddling with it and I’ll end the month with around maybe 25,000 words. Half way.
Anyway, I’ll back burner the project and come back to it when I’m inspired. In December I’ll be tackling a different writing project, a re-write of a previous work. In January I’ll be taking on another re-write. In February I plan to be starting on an entirely new project, assuming my research goes well. I am excited for all three projects. And I have a goal now. I want to polish up a couple things enough so I feel comfortable letting other people read them, another pass of re-writes/corrections and then actually paying someone to copy-edit them, either learning to format them myself or pay someone to do it, and then make them available for purchase for Kindle, iBooks and other markets.
I want 2012 to be a good year.