A NaNoWriMo 2011 recap

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has come and gone.  As a follow up to a previous post on NaNoWriMo as I have been going through it: a recap!

Yeah, I did it – I hit the 50k, ending the month at 55,364 words (well, according to the NaNoWriMo validator; I had bizarre footnotes that didn’t get picked up in the cut and paste from MS Word to the NaNoWriMo validator).

Is the story actually “finished”?  I managed to give it a title, “Living in the Gray,” and it seems to be about how the COO of this technologically-inclined corporation learns of corporate espionage going on against his corporation (but there’s no proof!), that he doesn’t really know what’s going in with bad accounting in his corporation, that the CEO is getting friendly with various international criminals, including an elderly war criminal but there’s no proof there either of why he’s doing that, and that the Little Orphan Annie like character isn’t happy that the COO isn’t going to take down crazy CEO (and besides being a drunk and being repeatedly referred to as a megalomaniac, is the CEO really “crazy”?).  At the “end,” the COO makes a decision to challenge the CEO, but the COO is staring into the sunrise, ambiguously…

Oh, and a wormhole showed up in the mid-chapters.  I really still don’t know why, other than my desperate desire for “action” and writing vigorously at a write-in with the other NYC Wrimo’s.  And, I literally ended on “to be continued?”  My previous Nano’s did not have the question mark, if only because I had ideas to eventually return and expand, and desire to revise.  This one – not so sure.  This wasn’t a Nano that I’m feeling terribly fond of at the moment.

Will this ever see the light of day?  Probably not.  But, I am feeling a little inspired to get back to revising one of my past Nano’s as a 2012 project, and at least I got back to writing fiction again, even when I so didn’t feel like it or even when I didn’t feel into this story and the characters.  The process got me to realize that I kept going, even if I didn’t really want to – probably a life lesson in there, somewhere.

Plus, NYC NaNoWriMo is a good bunch of crazy writing people.  We kept at it!  We did it – 50k or not, we wrote our asses off.  We do it because we can.

Last night, we had our Thank God It’s Over (TGIO) party in downtown Manhattan.  Our Municipal Liaison fshk announced how we got into a Village Voice article (fshk and alexisdaria and others got quoted) – so cool!  NYC NaNoWriMo rocks!

Writing fiction (and reading fiction) – to be continued…

(cross-posted at sswslitinmotion.tumblr.com).