Being Rebellious

I won Nanowrimo this year, and I did it by being absolutely rebellious.

I decided about three months ago to plan my Nano novel in advance this year and to also try a new genre for my 10th Nanowrimo anniversary. (Yikes!)

So I did. I had outlines, character sheets, I tried out the snowflake method, I had scene sketches, the works. Then, on Halloween, after a crazy busy and stressful week(s), having freshly lost a Halloween flash fiction contest, I ditched all of my planning. I just couldn’t do it.

I rebelled.

I started scribbling on a stray story seed that had been floating in my head for a while, but I also knew it wasn’t quite ready to be a full novel; it still needed a villain, for one thing. Keeping in mind my recent resolution not to stress out over deadlines, I decided to count everything I wrote during the month toward the word count goal.

The result?

A 52,000 word end count (partly estimate based on handwritten pages, so it might technically be a little higher than that). Masquerade’s secondary plotline is slowly filling in, Kingstone is finally almost to a place where I feel like I can start prying my perfectionistic claws out of it, that fairy tale novella I started back in August might actually be a novel, I have three new short pieces (complete), and I’ve freshened up an older one that I’m now thinking about folding into an anthology. Oh, yeah, and at the end of the month, that story seed got its villain. It’s going to be epic.

For the first test of my resolution not to set impossible goals: so far, so good.