My NaNo History
Yeah, I know, I'm already bragging with the icons in the sidebar, but I figured I'd do a special page about my NaNoWriMo history as well. This'll be a simple year by year breakdown, with each year introduced by it's own icon.
2003
2003 was my first year doing NaNoWriMo. I'd heard about it in 2002, but didn't feel ready to take it on at that time. That changed early 2003 when, for the first time, I started writing with a simple goal of 1000 words per day. As a result I finished a (first draft) novel for the first time by April.
When the year rolled around to November it also gave me the confidence to think I could probably make it through NaNoWriMo, so I picked a project and started. In the end November 2003 saw a complete first draft of 70k words appear in just 26 days. Way more than I'd thought I could ever write in a month.
The amount of writing I got done, and the thrill of winning, were enough to get me hooked on doing NaNoWriMo.
2004
2004 was a little bit down from the high of 2003. The story never ran quite as smoothly as I'd have wanted, which made getting truly high daily wordcounts hard. It was a bit of a struggle to get to 50k in time, though I managed about 53k in the end.
Looking back I just hadn't put quite enough world building in to be ready for the story, which left a lot of patching things together in the middle of writing to make it somewhat believable sci-fi. It was much harder work to get through NaNo than the year before, that's for sure.
At 53k the novel I was writing wasn't finished, but because of the way I'd struggled with it during NaNo I left it for a while afterwards, not finishing it until early 2006. I've recently re-read the first draft, and given how thrown together some of the worldbuilding was, I found it surprisingly readable Space Opera.
2005
2005 saw a new element entering my NaNoWriMo world: sibling rivalry. After hearing me talk about NaNoWriMo for two years my sister decided to give it a go as well. Whether it was the sibling rivalry, or the fact that I'd more than done my worldbuilding this time (including a map set as my desktop background just in case) my wordcount almost doubled from 2004. I topped out on 104k words, midnight on the 30th.
The other new thing is that 2005 saw me become a lot more active on the NaNo forums. The years before I'd kicked around a little on Reaching 50k, and genre forums, but in 2005 I jumped into the Holland & Belgium regional forum. One of the most active regional forums around, and a fun bunch of people to hang out with.
Because it's the first time I really paid attention to the regional forum 2005 is also the first year I attended the Dutch Kick Off and TGIO parties. I still can't quite describe it, but getting together with 30 or more people who are equally nuts about writing is now one of the things I look forward to most for NaNoWriMo.
2006
2006 continued the trend from 2005. I had my worldbuilding in place and my sister to compete with on wordcounts. I reached 50k in a week, and 120k by the end of the month. So far this is my NaNoWriMo high water mark.
The one problem in 2006 was that I pretty much ran out of story around 80k words. Fortunately there was scope for a two parter, so I decided to write part 2 in the same file and keep the worcount going. Technically it was stretching the definition of "Novel" a little, but I figured it could be allowed under the circumstances.
Aside from my best ever total wordcount NaNoWriMo 2006 also gave me my best ever single day wordcount so far. Sunday November 5th saw a total of 16,011 words written. For that matter the four sundays together actually saw more than 50k written, meaning I could have taken all other days of and still made the official NaNoWriMo goal.
2007
2007 was down a bit from 2006 again. The writing actually went pretty well, when I got around to it, but getting around to it was problematic, especially during the week. In a way things went the way they could have in 2006, with virtually all my writing done in the weekends (though not exclusively on Sunday).
Even with just the weekends I managed to get 50k by the 20th, and 65k by the 25th. I actually left things there, at 65,056 because I rather liked the way the wordcount looked. And I wanted to contribute something to the Holland & Belgium community effort for 2007: Knights of the NaNo Table.
Although it worked to get the words I needed I feel a little dissatisfied about NaNo 2007 because of the lack of writing during the weeks. Granted I had more to do on other thing that I'd had to do previous years, but during NaNoWriMo there really shouldn't be 0 word days unless there's a finished novel.