I’m still here. I’m still clicking away at the keys. I love NaNoWriMo. It’s one of my favorite times of the year. I have never failed not to have a good time for NaNo. And I’ve won it every year since my first in 2008.

I remember one year I wrote 185,000 words in November. I wrote with delicious abandonment. I didn’t care about rules or craft. I just wrote to write. And it was glorious fun, and exhausting, and just plain amazing. I’ve never been able to come near that wordage again. My average NaNoWriMo challenge ends up usually about 75-100k, which is still quite a lot, honestly.

I think about that one year a lot, and wonder what the difference is.

Maybe it’s that I was challenged by the ML in Atlanta at the time.

Maybe it’s that we ended up head to head with a word war every day for a month.

Or maybe it was the fact that I didn’t let myself follow rules. I have no idea.

I don’t think I will ever duplicate that month again. I don’t think I’ll ever be in that position where I write two full length novels in one month. 185k is a lot, and it’s hard. Hard on the mind, hard on the body. I don’t think I wrote anything for a good two months after that.

But I do enjoy NaNo for the sole reason that I get to have fun and do things that are awesome with other writers. Maybe not all of them are professional writers like me. Maybe for some of them it’s a hobby. That’s okay. I don’t care. I just like being around people who get me, who understand the crazy and why I do what I do.

For now, I’m just chipping away at a story that has been marinating for over a year, but I couldn’t find the time to write it. And honestly, I think that’s the best part of NaNo for me. I take a month off from obligatory and contractual writing to write a book that I would write for fun. Not that I wouldn’t write the others for fun, too, but this is a book that probably will never make me money. It will probably not resonate with my core audience. But I’m still going to write it. Because I want to. Because I’ll enjoy it.

Current word count for the month is 25,674. How’s your NaNo going?