I reached the NaNoWriMo 2010 50K word count on the 30th at 5PM with dry eyes, swollen ankles, bandaged wrists, dark cricles and heartburn.
There are many things I regret and many I don’t that I should. I’m going to start with the late ones because these are so much more fun to tell.
I do not regret planning a big part of the plot beforehand, and I should because it drove me CRAZY. It was just so hard to keep truth with the main plot I had designed for the novel! Sometimes I just wanted to write some very fluffy stuff and I was actually stuck in a bloody scene with vomit and death and tears and all I wanted was to write a very warm moment of two people in a cafeteria drinking tea and talking about love.
BUT NO. I had to suck it up and write about blood and tears and ice and death. I am proud of myself for managing to go through that and because I pushed myself out of my nutshell. I don’t regret it because I also found time for coffee shops and kisses.
I do not regret procrastinating. Even though it did make me anxious and made me cry and pushed me to the limit, it also added some fever to it, some challenge and God knows (?) I can’t move a finger if I’m not being pushed to it. Procrastinating led me to desperation and desperation to many fairly good ideas like killing everyone, adding hookers or writing flashbacks. It all sounds awful, right? It isn’t, it was all brilliant.
(It also led me to write very smutty stuff about two characters that weren’t supposed to even know each other and because it was illogical and I didn’t want porn in my novel, as soon as possible I selected all the crap and pressed de ‘Delete’ key.)
I do not regret the whining. People hate whiny people (or at least so do I) and I know this but at some point the whining turned into serious neediness and a serious stress reliever. We should all whine a little, just a little. Cry if you must because tears wash things away and give you new perspectives to stuff (if ‘life’ sounds too corny for you. It does for me). I stopped hating myself because I whined and cried with a person that was smart and supportive enough to let me whine but to kick my mind into resuming my work when the whining was over.
I do not regret having someone by my side to cheer me up but nobody does and nobody should. Next.
I do not regret the nights spent only drinking coffee and the heartburn. I should because it still hurts sometime but not sleeping at all in 43 hours felt funny. (I was seriously 2mm close to ask ‘is this real life?’ NO KIDDING)
I do not regret messing up the daily word count. Very pretty stats and graphics I find boring and I have to tell you, my graphic is beautiful and desperate! Writing more than 1667 words daily, reading ‘At This Rate You Will Finish On December 08’ IS EXHILARATING. It kills your brain, but in the end (and of course if you make it to the 30th alive and to 50K words in time) the craziness it kinda grows on you.
I do not regret being my own everlasting editor. Knowing that I was writing good stuff and that I was writing at my best (at least most of the time) made me keep going. I don’t do things halfway and me without my inner editor means halfway. I didn’t write most of it thinking it was a draft. I don’t normally do drafts so I knew that what I was writing was going to be the final result. That’s why I got so behind.
Sorry nanotips.
And now for the stuff I DO regret.
I DO REGRET FUCKIN UP ALL MY BACKUPS. I lost about 4K words because of that stupid STUPID overwrite button. Seriously, having around 40 backups means nothing if you’re going to forget to make them after the 15 and on the 28 you’re going to overwrite the main document with an older version. If I make it to 2011 NaNoWriMo (and If NaNo does, as well) I will be so much more careful. I wasted an hour crying the loss.
I do regret packing my month with stuff to do. I had a martial arts tournament, finals, shitons of school projects, and well… NaNo. It was very hard to keep up with everything and I wish NaNoWriMo was held another time of the year because these are always hard times for me, but I guess I’ll just have to cope with it again.
Why yes, I am waiting.
I do regret neglecting my fingernails, they’re hideous right now and I might as well fix them because I’m going out and this is just pathetic. But that’s it, that’s all I regret.
(Except in general putting myself though this by choice that, seriously, is so NOT a good idea if you’re not the least of a masochist).
Now I have around 47,000 words and about two thirds of the story, at most. And the magic is? From the 50K I kept 47K, and from those 47 at least 45 are IMPRESSIVELY safe. So, 30 days and forty five thousand words that are staying?
It was an exhausting month and even though I still have some jetlag, baggage to recover and the plane’s gone, the aftermath of the trip is still tasty.
You may worship me now.
P.D. Believe it or not, I already have a plot (or rather two) for next year. It’s either about a 40’s seventeen year old girl who’s apathetic to school and society but it’s in love with her Ethics professor, or about México getting split into two nations, North and South, in the north the Catholic neocapitalists and in the south the Atheist communists. The second sounds better but it will give me pain. Hey, how about that? Just like this year!