NaNoWriMo (kinda)

So for the second year in a row I've participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which takes place every November. Essentially, it ia an honor-based, just-for-fun "contest" in which anyone who wants to can create an account and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel (kinda short though, so more like a novelette) in a single month, spanning from 12:00:01 AM November 1st through 11:59:59 November 30th.

Last year, I took the opportunity to get down 60% or so of a rough draft of a fantasy novel. Or should I say, a fantasy sequel, as it is, indeed, a sequel to the fantasy novel I've been tinkering with since high school (and which I've finished, to the extent that I'm now searching for literary agents / publishers / etc in attempt to publish it.)

This year, because I wasn't quite ready to put this task aside and work on another completely new project (and becasue NaNo snuck up on me this year, and I wasn't nearly prepared enough to do it again on a completely new topic) I decided to create my own personal "version" of NaNo. The entire "contest" is just a meaningless fun motivator to get lots of writing done, so I decided that going through my completed rough draft from last year (and I mean VERY rough, even for a first draft) I could reasonably consider every 2 words rewritten as 1 word written anew. In short, I proposed to turn last year's novel into a completely updated 2nd draft (spanning ~100,000 words intead of 50,000).

It's really amazing what you can get done in your spare time when you have a hard deadline to finish. I actually managed to do it. Looking back at the two years, I honestly can't say which is more challenging -- writing 50k words of a rough draft of a novel, when you don't care whatsoever if the words make any sense, so long as you get SOMEthing down on paper -- or REwriting 50k words, refusing to move past any segemnt in the novel until it meets the satisfaction of a relatively clean draft. I was going to rewriting my quantity into quality this time. While I'm sure I'll want to go through and make 3rd, 4th, etc drafts in the future, it was very fun and refreshing to make this much progress in a single month.