Life after NaNoWriMo

Well, I did it! I finished the NaNoWriMo challenge (National Novel Writing Month). I got my 50,000 words done in the month of November. The book I wrote is so not done, of course, there is a lot of editing and rewriting to be done before it will be ready for readers. There is a huge sense of accomplishment when you get to two days before the month is over and still have to write 20,000 words, and you get it done. Yay!!

I wrote over 5.000 words the day after Thanksgiving and then 14,700 words the last day of the month. This should have been impossible as my average writing speed is somewhere around 1000 words per hour. Somehow, I pulled it off and I never want to write that many words in one day again.
In April, I set this audacious goal of 85,000 words and made it... then didn't write again until July. That wasn't a good plan.

So, as I was looking around on the internet, I found WriYe, which I have been doing for the last year. The goal is to write a certain number of words all throughout the year. I am at 188,000 of the 250,000 word goal I set for myself last year at this time. Not too bad, but I hope to finish the year a little closer to the 250,000. The problem with the challenge is that I just don't get enough push from it. So, I kept looking around.

And I found ROW80, which is a Round of Words in 80 days. I love this idea. If NaNoWriMo is a sprint, trying to get 50,000 words written in one month, turning off the inner editor and just getting the thing down on paper, then ROW80 is a marathon. It understands that we all have a life, we cannot ignore our spouses, pets and personal hygiene for the entire rest of our lives in order to write. Yes, this does sometimes happen during NaNo. How do you suppose I wrote 14,000 words in one day? It was not pretty.

So, it looks like there are goals to write and try to reach and posts that need to happen twice a week, Sunday and Wednesday. I am just a baby at this writing thing, so I will start small, but I will start and hope to get five novels written over the next year. I also need to get physically back in shape. I can't just be writing and working, there has to be some physical movement. So, eating well, exercise, and writing, writing, writing.

I may even try to write a little booklet on depression to hand out to patients. This has been something I've been thinking about for a while now. I have a few books I recommend, but they are kind of long and I think it's not fair to make people go buy something to get better. Maybe a little starter booklet that would give them some of the information that I have picked up over time and that we talk about in the clinic but you can never remember by the time you leave.