NaNoWriMo in Retrospect

      Well, depending on your metrics, my first ever participation in National Novel Writing Month was either a colossal failure or a moderate success. If you go by word count (which is a lot of the point), then I failed miserably to reach the 50,000 word goal for the month. I was pretty sure I'd never be able to keep up the pace required to crank out that much material, and sure enough, by the end of week one, I was already hopelessly behind. Before Thanksgiving I got sick, then we traveled for the holiday, and blah, blah, blah, excuses, excuses, excuses. To make a long story short (pun intended), I ended up with less than 15,000 words produced.
      But. That's far more than I would usually produce in that time frame (I'm counting the time as about 2 1/2 weeks; after that, I worked on it almost not at all), because I've always been a terrible fiddler--I hate to commit stuff to the page that I know is going to get edited out later, and I spend way too much time finessing sentences as I go. Which takes forever, and leads to the discouragement of low output. With the artificial deadline of NaNoWriMo, I was compelled to go ahead and set some crap down, even knowing that it would never see the light of day, and that really helped push my story idea forward in a way I've never been able to accomplish before.
      So I didn't end up with anything approaching a completed book, but I did get the benefit of the mental exercise. Hopefully it will serve as a reminder as I go forward to "just write it down, stupid." Maybe I should get that printed up on a coffee mug, or better yet, a beer glass.