Post NaNo Blues

 So, another year, another NaNoWriMo has passed.

 Same old, same old, right?

 Wrong!

 This year I actually managed to pull it off!

A winner is me.

 I feel like a proud mother.

 And like any mother, not everything I did is worth a damn, but this is a risk of any creative process.

 Including making people.

 Unfortunately.

 This year I didn't do one long novel I haven't finished.

 No!

 This year I managed to create a complete story.

 More than one, actually.

 Yeah, my initial idea couldn't hold on for a full fifty thousand words, so I ended up having to supplement my word count with a few short stories.

 Three, to be exact.

 Two I have finished, and a third that still needs to be completed.

 In the spirit of sharing, I shall leave the first lines of each of these four stories below in a suitably aesthetic manner.





 (I'll make a separate post about the novella that I ran out of thirty five thousand words into the month on Wednesday.)

Novella

Short Story One

Short Story Two

Short Story Three

 Honestly, I was going to write about how I felt like I had no direction any more, but doing these aesthetic images has really kept me occupied for the last two days.

 Especially that first one.

 So much tiiiime.

 It was fun, though.

 I suppose what I'm really planning to do next is work on creating a sustainable work flow.

 A daily word count, a work day, as working week.

 That sort of thing.

 This last NaNoWriMo was not only successful in terms of getting the full 50k, but also in that I felt like I had a productive workflow. I didn't have that ideal of a work day every day, but for a few days, i really felt like I did, so that's what December is all about, creating a sustainable working life.

And part one of that is an ambitious project to achieve a further 20k in five days.

 (I didn't manage to finish short story three, and last year's NaNo project is still hanging over my head like a harpy waiting to punish me for my sins. So those are currently a priority.)

 My thought process is that I can work my way to establishing a pair of schedules where I write every day in both, but one gives me more time to focus on editing extant drafts and the other is about creating the dreaded first draft.

 (Also, finishing those fan fictions I started forever ago. Whoops.)

 I'm going to keep track of my progress on this 20k/5 days project (also the name of a Tetsuya Nomura game, btw) on a day by day basis and report my experience at the end of day Friday.

 So, this is an ambitious first week coming back to blogging.

 They don't call me the Slytherin of Blogspot for nothing!

 They- they just don't call me that at all...