Na Po Wri Mo: Lessons Learned
Numbers
Total November word count: 21796. Stories begun: 18. Stories posted: 11. Stories that reached endings: 8.
What did I learn?
Success or failure?
Well, I didn't meet my stated goals. Not good. On the other hand, I did quite a bit more writing than I usually do, and judging by the comment threads people liked it, so continuing in this direction sounds like a good plan. I think I'm going to class this under the politeness of "only giving up is failure."
Where Next?
The other thing that I'll be doing in December is polishing several of these stories and putting them up on FurAffinity. If anyone has suggestions about which story this should happen to first, please sound off. Ersatz versions of people reading this LJ will remain pseudonymous unless you tell me in so many words that it's okay to use you directly.
Total November word count: 21796. Stories begun: 18. Stories posted: 11. Stories that reached endings: 8.
What did I learn?
- I'm rather more squeamish than I thought about writing smut, especially for weirdsex. That bothers me because it contradicts my self-image.
- 1,000 words a day only works as an average - the stories that I was happy with ranged from about 3,000 to 5,000 words. So doing a bunch of shorts wasn't necessarily easier.
- The open call for suggestions, on the other hand, was a great idea. I'm going to keep grinding through those until I've used at least one suggestion per person (some of you were marvelous and threw many suggestions at me). So that's my December project. By my count there are at least 15 suggestions to go through.
- Further, I'm going to do this exercise again in a few months - I hope you're all willing to play the game again!
- I should block out at least 90 minutes to get writing done, because it takes me as much as an hour to get my brain to put down distractions and to get into a helpful frame of mind. I'm not sure whether leaving other applications open helps or not.
- I wrote almost all of this in Google Documents - I feel a bit guilty about treating my collection of half-empty notebooks so poorly, but writing in longhand feels just agonizingly slow. Also I grasp pens and pencils far too tightly, so I have a tendency to hurt myself by writing longhand. Yes, university blue-book tests tend to be miserable for me.
- I got an idea of where I am in development as a writer. I like writing dialogue more than action, and I can write more in a day than I thought - the question is sitting down to actually do it. So the problems that are bothering me most are less "I can't do this" than "I haven't developed habits conducive to actually sitting down and doing this." That's an overall positive.
Success or failure?
Well, I didn't meet my stated goals. Not good. On the other hand, I did quite a bit more writing than I usually do, and judging by the comment threads people liked it, so continuing in this direction sounds like a good plan. I think I'm going to class this under the politeness of "only giving up is failure."
Where Next?
The other thing that I'll be doing in December is polishing several of these stories and putting them up on FurAffinity. If anyone has suggestions about which story this should happen to first, please sound off. Ersatz versions of people reading this LJ will remain pseudonymous unless you tell me in so many words that it's okay to use you directly.