NaNoWriMo 2023 FINISHED

NaNoWriMo 2023 has come to a close, and I'm not sure if I'm relieved, sad, energized, or a combination of all three.

Probably all three.

I finished last night at 51,767 words, including 36 hours (36,000 words' equivalency) of revisions of the part of the draft from last year.  For the first time ever, I kept my word count above par for the entire month, and received the daily update badge.

The final write-in of the year went off without a hitch, but also somehow without much fanfare.  I almost regret that, looking back at it.  We have one final event, a TGIO (Thank Goodness It's Over) party on Saturday, and then we're done until next year.

I've already set up a new project goal on NaNoWriMo's site to complete the novel, hopefully by the end of the year.  Once I removed all the revision "words" and added back words I wrote in last year's draft, I had 72,030.  Some of those still need to be cut from this year's draft, of course, but all in all that's more word count than I was expecting.

Since I think I'm only about halfway done with the story, it also means this is going to be a longer novel than I thought it would be.  I set my overall goal to 100,000 words, but I'm really going for a range of between 100,000 and 120,000.  If I reach 120,000, that would be about 400 pages in book form, which isn't a bad length.

My goal is to write at least 1,000 words a day and hopefully finish the book by the end of the year.  I'm hoping that on good days, I'll actually get significantly more than 1,000 words a day, and make up the difference between 100,000 and 120,000 there.  But ultimately I decided it would be better to set the goal at the lower end of my range and overshoot it, than to set it higher and not reach it at all.

I'm planning to schedule my writing time first thing after my coffee every day whenever possible, so that I can get it done and out of the way on days where I'm not inspired to write more than 1,000 words, and to give me time to continue writing on days where I feel motivated to do so.

With any luck, I can finish this draft by the end of the year, and start on revisions and other tasks after the holidays!