Final count: 17,746 words. I may not have “won” NaNoWriMo this year, but in a larger sense, I accomplished exactly what I wanted.
My draft of Altars and Acolytes, aka Oh, How I Wish Stories Wrote Themselves, is done. Still needs work, but the story’s coherent, it follows an outline, and successive edits won’t be nearly the slog that this draft was. I wrote maybe 13K to get to the end. My plan of throwing out everything and writing the third act from scratch actually worked.
The 4K I wrote following that has been split up a few ways. I’ve written 2K for a short story entitled “Juicers,” which is about bicycle generators. (No, really.) I’ve thrown in a blog post or two into that count, as well as a poem.
Given the, shall we say, calamitous events of this month, it’s a small miracle that anyone wrote anything at all. Yet writing reminded me that I still have value, that my voice deserves to be heard, and that making art can be a way forward.
Now, hopefully next year I can start something new for a change. Ad astra per aspira.