NaNo Retrospective 2022

Photo by Ioana Cristiana on Unsplash

I have three objectives for NaNo this year. To the surprise of absolutely no one, I didn't actually accomplish any of them, but I got close on one, and made what I would consider creditable progress on another. The third, I didn't even touch, but we'll get to that. 

I wrote fiction, like, actually made progress all but two days this month. The two missed days were the seventh and the twenty-eighth, for whatever it may be worth. On the seventh, I was trying to someways rearrange my sleep schedule, and lost track of which calendar day it was. On the twenty-eighth, I definitely opened up the document, maybe even put on my writing playlist, but apparently I just didn't get any words written. It must be emphasized, before we move on from this point, that "progress", in some cases, meant two or three words, not even a full sentence, but hey, two or three is a lot more than zero, and some of the days it was more like a few hundred. The added pressure of "gotta make progress every day" didn't really change anything once I had the document open, but it was an additional incentive to actually do that part. So, that's our lesson learned this year, for you and me both. Open the document. Look at it with your eyeballs, every day that you can.

I did not finish the final chapter of Ghani. I wrote most of the second scene (of three), but it's slow going. Perrin's not too hard to write for short or casual conversation, but there's a lot more of him in this one, and it's hard. Also having some of that, y'know, wrapping up a project anxiety. This is the final chapter of, by word count, a novella, and it has to work as an ending, even though this fic is also the first in a series. At least, with no release date for season two, I don't yet have a real deadline, just a general sense of urgency. 

I didn't even start on trying to write, on the computer, 5000 words of the park service faeries novel. This one was always kind of a reach - the idea was to start on it after I finished Ghani, but I didn't finish Ghani, so. I'm not terribly upset, but it does mean I'll need to create another opportunity to try drafting fiction in a word processor. I'll probably take a stab at it after I finish Ghani, even though it won't be NaNo anymore, assuming I can finish Ghani before the new season comes out, and if I can't do that, I'm not really sure what we're doing here. I do have some kind of feelings about the fact that it's been most of a year, a year less a few days perhaps, since I worked on any original fiction of any kind. Even the work I've done on things other than Cierto/Ghani has been on other fanfiction. Those who follow me on AO3 will see that work eventually, but for the time being they're side projects, and prioritized accordingly. 

So, that was NaNo 2022. Uneventful, as these things go. We will resume your regularly scheduled programming later this week. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things.