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Like many other people around the world, I wrote the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in November.  This is the third year I have done so, and 2009 in particular gave me an extra boost to dig into revision of other works after I hit my required word count.  I had been in a bit of a funk for the past few months with my writing.  NaNoWriMo gave me the permission to drop all of my excuses and just write.

No inner editor.

No wondering if I could sell the work.

No complaining to myself that I was too busy to write.

Starbucks made some serious money from me last month.  I personally contributed to helping end the recession by drinking lots of coffee and eating lots of coffee cake.  I completed draft one of this year's NaNoWriMo novel by November 20th.  It's the second work in a series I've had my hands in for awhile.  November 21st began my descent into serious revision of book one.

Another toy that helped liberate me from my inner editor this past November was writing on an Alphasmart.  I didn't have to look at the squiggly lines in Microsoft Word telling me I had misspelled words.  I plowed ahead and wrote as if typos didn't exist. 

Typos don't exist during NaNoWriMo in the same way that calories don't exist in December.

Now that it is December and typos exist again, I'm in the delightful process of extracting my plot from the garble I typed.  I ran it through a spell check and nearly 10% of the typos were strange enough that I had no idea what word I was trying to type on the Alphasmart.  The tedium of fixing my NaNoWriMo is a battle I'm looking forward to in the latter half of December and into January.

I wouldn't have it any other way.  :)

Tags: Jen Bluekissed | NaNoWriMo | motivation | revision