Half NaNo... The End

*coughcough it's December 5th already coughcough*

Technically this post should have appeared on Friday the 30th, but I was having a really crazy day that day... finishing the last-minute bits of the P&P95 Forever Club (a six-month project with a certain best friend that took a tremendous amount of time and of which I'm unashamedly proud) and racing to get 3500 words written so I could finish Half NaNo on time (more on that later), preparing for ten overnight guests (I kid you not) and dissolving into sobs of frustration over the waistband of a skirt I was making for my aunt that just wouldn't lie flat, only to find that I'd misunderstood the directions (I still maintain it was the stupid pattern's fault for printing confusing diagrams).  This is why I like to draft my own patterns.

So that is why I didn't get the post up until now.  Part of the reason also may be that I didn't want to admit defeat.

Yeah, defeat.

I fell 1,300 words short of my goal.  Thirteen hundred measly words.  Words I probably could have cranked out in under two hours if I had just had the time.  Which I didn't.

And yet, though I didn't make my goal, I don't feel like I failed.  This can mean one of two things-- a) that I simply refuse to admit that I couldn't do something or b) that the point of Half NaNo was more than just accomplishing 25K.

I'm going with B. Because I really did accomplish what I set out to accomplish with Half NaNo.  The Rochesters finished November at a whopping 32,256 words, which is far, far more than I would have written had I not been working under the Half NaNo threat incentive.  I learned way more about my characters.  (Even though I didn't do Beautiful People every week... cough cough ahem.)  I introduced new plot twists (one of which I'm thinking of scrapping, actually... but that's not the point).  I changed a character's name (because the old one just didn't sit right).  I wrote scenes that had been giving me trouble even just in the outline.  I wrote when I felt like it, I wrote when I didn't feel like it, I worked through a head cold and Thanksgiving and schoolwork and a computer crash.

And now, even though I didn't "win" Half NaNo, I feel pretty much invincible right now.  The feeling will pass, Lizzy, and no doubt more quickly than it should, but for now I'm enjoying it.

How'd you do?