Final NaNoFiMo total—33200, or thereabouts. Not nearly the wordcount of a NaNoWriMo, but I finished two books under contract and stuck words on a couple of other projects, so it was generally a very productive month.
Despite the constant harping that writers sit down and write every single day, I will confess to you that I don’t. I sit down between two and four times a week and try to hammer out a thousand words. Since there are only 15K worth of words in a Dragonbreath book, this allows me to finish two a year easily, and fool with other stuff. If I were a conventional novelist, I might work to a different schedule, but there you are.
My only point with that is that there is no one true writing schedule, and writers who will try to tell you that NaNoWriMo is just normal life and all Real Writers write every single day to a specific word count are perhaps being unnecessarily hidebound. I hardly ever write on weekends, for example. And sometimes I can only lay down five hundred words, and I do write Dragonbreath books on the assumption that at some point, I will get struck by lightning and knock out three thousand words and get large chunks of the book done thereby.
I understand why people say these things, since writing is Real Work and it is easy to put it off when it’s not fun any more or get really soppy about the need to be inspired and how it just isn’t flowing and that must mean you are blocked, etc etc ad nauseum, and so sometimes the easiest way to establish that discipline is to sit down every day and demand the brain to perform. If it works, fantastic! Those people may well have a higher level of completed projects than me, and more power to ’em. However, if you tend to work in jags and spurts and spend several days at the time when you do not Sit Down And Write Goddamnit, I will humbly submit that you are not an imposter posing as a writer, you are not Doin’ It Wrong, as long as all the writing does get done in a timely fashion (i.e. by deadline.)
So, y’know.
