NaNoWriMo 2022: Results & Thoughts

[quillpunk]

On the 27th, I won NaNoWriMo!

I've won camp nano before, but it's never been more than a 20k goal. I've also done big nano before, but never gotten further than 25k words. That said, I can't back up that data because I deleted all those old projects from my nano profile. Oops. (...It felt cluttered and messy. I had to clean things up, okay.)

But this time, I won. 50k words in 27 days, with an average speed of around 1880 words per day.

I don't think I need to state again how strange that is.

Nevertheless, here's the winning method (so I don't forget next time, lol):

I never once looked at the stat page this month. I've always done that before—looked at the stat page, seen how many words I need to write per day on average (that dreaded 1667 number) and tried to adjust things for that. I've made schedules—write this many words these days, take a day off here, write this much again. And so on.

It's never worked, obviously. I'm neurodivergent, and I can't keep track of time in that manner. A month from now doesn't exist for me and neither does a week. I'm also physically disabled so some days I literally can't write at all. I even have executive dysfunction up the hoolabalooza (hello 4 AM, my old friend).

But this time, I threw all those schedules away. I never worried about the big picture, never tried to figure out how much I needed to write to keep on track. And you know, I checked my stat page once I did win; I never fell behind, even on the slower days.

In the end, it's just about writing as much as possible today. Because tomorrow neither exists nor matters, and I can't count on it. I can't plan like that. I don't think like that.

Today is the only thing that's real, that I can feel, that I can touch and affect and change.

Tomorrow doesn't exist.

...I still can't really believe I won. I don't entirely comprehend how this happened, even though I just laid it out. I wrote as much as possible every single day, and sometimes that was 3k words and sometimes it was 500, and it was always awesome. Always okay! I didn't push beyond what I felt comfortable with!

And somehow that all stacked up to 50'000 words.

That's kind of fucking incredible.

Comments

[quillpunk]

thank you! (i'm still utterly bamboozled, lol)