Well…it’s December 1st. I’m no longer chained to my NaNo WIP, and no longer on the hook for 50,000 words in 30 days.

Bet you’re wondering how I did? Ahh…I didn’t think so. But I’ll tell ya anyway. Last night, around midnight, I clocked in at 30,077 words. Considerably less than I hoped for, but hella more than I expected. Having a week of null-computer time cut me deeply–not having my familiar setup made me just a little compulsively nutty. Adding a 14-hr round trip roadtrip over Thanksgiving probably didn’t help, either. I took my laptop, thinking (somewhat foolishly) that family time with the kids in tow meant I could sneak away and get some work done. I should have known that Mr. Xandra is consummately better at sneaking away from family than I am. Of course, he did most of the driving, so I could hardly begrudge him a nap. I may be mean, but I’m not totally heartless.

But every year I participate in NaNoWriMo (and this will make my fourth year now), I learn something new about my writing process. NaNos, BIAWs (Book In A Week, with no word count goal, simply a week where every waking moment you can spare is spent writing new materials), goal-setting challenges (a big shout-out to my local RWA chapter, which runs a goals list that’s incredibly supportive and has come in very handy for me–our list mistress, Jennette Powell, deserves a huge cheer because she has a gift for knowing when to push and the right thing to say to encourage us to keep forging ahead), they all teach me just a little more about my writing process and its constant evolution. Last year’s NaNo taught me that I could make serious progress in world building if I just let my imagination go and not worry about whether or not it fit into the story. As a result, I have a story with a rich world and even if much of the material never makes it into the finished product, it’s still there, and making the world more real to me, and hopefully more real to the readers as well. This year, I learned something that I suspected prior to November’s efforts–if I don’t have a beginning, I’m not going anywhere. I spent about 20,000 words in set-up. It was useful–most of it, anyway, as it has given me possible glimpses into the lives of the characters prior to the inciting incident. But it took me about 23,000 words to come up with a convincing beginning to the story. I got so sick of trying to push my characters together that once I got an inciting incident (and it by no means is a great one, but that’s what this POS…er, Discovery draft–is), I jumped ahead and had to work on something else. The ending. From the ending, I finally figured out what the story should be. So now I can get the characters into a story that will fit them, and fit the ending I’ve written for them.

But not, I think, today. It’s funny, but the WIP I’d been working on up until then (my pet WIP), I’d just started getting into the next level with it when NaNo came up and I had to put it aside (the rules of NaNo say that you have to start on something new and try to write through to the end of the story, the idea being that you have a 50,000 word story framework that you can edit and revise at a later date). Periodically during the month, I’ve had the strongest urges to get this WIP going again, but had to control them in favor of building up word count for the NaNo. Free of that, I can now return to my blond hunk of a telepath who can read the minds of women everywhere–their most secret desires, their most passionate longings…

Okay, so what am I still doing here?