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It’s November, and my third year of doing the “NaNoWriMo” thing. Last year, well I blogged about last year. here, here, here, and here. The odd thing I just noticed is my current wordcount shows up on last year’s posts. You’ll have to take my word for it I did the 100K plus words last year. That was such an insane thing to do, I have no such plans to attempt a double-duty a second time around. One will be more than enough for me, thank you.

This morning, I woke up to a total of 5,000 words and thinking maybe I’d bail on the project. After all, the whole idea of NaNoWriMo for me has often been to just get me writing again. And, I’ve been writing my fingers off pretty constantly without NaNoWriMo for an excuse. I’ve made 53 blog posts since January 2011. That’s roughly 40,000 words alone. Short stories I’ve been writing add up to roughly to another 50,000. I didn’t do anything with last year’s messes I created during NaNoWriMo. One could be edited down to a 25,000 word short story with relative ease. The other could be beefed up to become a full novella. Add to that, I have the previous year’s NaNo project gathering dust, if that’s what happens when a project is completely digitized, and the novel I started several years ago in the UW Writing Program I took. I have about a dozen more ideas sketched out in small word documents, waiting to be rediscovered when I have time. So, instead of two NaNo projects, I’m doing one NaNo project plus multiple short stories under both my regular name and my pen name, hosting a book tour stop on my erotica blog, blogging here, blogging there, and trying to keep up with all the social media involved in this. I’m tweeting occasionally and following other writers in both spheres of writing.

What happened between this morning’s questioning of my sanity at doing this again with only 5,000 words on the 8th day and this post? Magic. That thing that happens when you sit down to write and the words flow. Right now, I am a little giddy with a word count high. Some of the six thousand words I whipped out this morning are put together in well-crafted sentences–a bonus! Editing during NaNo will slow you down, so the whole idea is to get that first draft (the one Anne Lamotte calls the vomit draft) out there. It’s nice to re-read just a little bit and see some nice…erm…chunks…that I can use someday. Granted, I did play a little game with conjunctions, after all why not get two words for “you are” instead of one? But it was one of those “good days” when it comes to writing. I might even go a do a little more.

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