I nearly entitled this post December Retrospective but then I thought that didn’t sound right. I’m looking back at November not December, I’m just writing it in December. Oh lets face it my brain is fried, I’m not even sure retrospective is the right word. Basically a post looking back at November and the madness that is NaNoWriMo.

I wrote a post about NaNo before November started stating my goals and what my thoughts were about the challenge this year. So it’s time to compare what I thought and hoped would happen with what actually did. What lessons did I learn this year? More importantly what am I going to do to carry it forward?

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Next month is November and every November since 2007 I’ve tried to write 50,000 words in a month, aka taking part in NaNoWriMo. Posting about this insanity here isn’t new, in fact I just created a category for it. I attempted to spread the insanity around and do the challenge in April for Camp NaNoWriMo, but I failed that miserably as the word count meter to the right has betrayed ever since.

So if I’ve posted about it before, which I have, why am I posting about it again? Well, because I feel like it. I’m not going to disappear for the month, I’m still going to post here if I get a topic in mind, I’m still going to raid with my guild, in all probability I’m going to get blizzcon virtual ticket. November isn’t going to just be about words, but I do hope that it contains a lot of them.

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Every November, bar one, since 2007 I’ve gone a little nuts and tried to write a novel in a month. 50,000 words is the goal which isn’t bad for a first draft, as first drafts do tend to balloon a bit on revising. I wrote a little bit about this last November and now I’m going to be writing about it again. “Hey wait a minute! It’s not November!” I hear you exclaim. Yeah that’s very true but this year I will be taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo.

Camp NaNoWriMo is a smaller program run by the Office of Letters and Light, the not for profit that operates NaNoWriMo. Rebels writing anything other than 50k words of a novel aren’t shunned in November, but they aren’t actively supported either. However, at Camp whatever you decide to write, and whatever word count you decide to strive for, is supported. You can put your custom word count goal onto your page, something that is missing (but should be added for overachievers) from the main NaNoWriMo program. This year Camp is in April and July. Today it’s March 31st, the first day of April’s session is tomorrow.

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I’ve been a bit absent this month, with the blog and in game. My guild have been incredibly supportive with it, and haven’t complained once. You guys are awesome! I’m interrupting the Warcraft posts yet again with this. Maybe I should change the tagline to ‘A mostly Warcraft blog’ as it’s been mostly not this month. I’m not going to go back to playing as much as I was, so I need to organise my playtime better so I actually get things done. Dailies, I am looking at you, I haven’t done you in a month, haven’t capped valor in even longer. Oh I’m a bad Warcraft player, but I just need to be a little more organised. Can’t do everything, but could do more.

Anyway, the month of November and the challenge of NaNoWriMo are coming to a close. So it’s time for a little bit of a recap on how the month went.

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This is a Warcraft blog. I’ve tried to blog a few times over the years but never had any success at sticking to it until now. That being said I do on occasion blog about other stuff, and this is one of those occasions. A little short post to explain what that new widget on the sidebar is.

You see while I might not have had much success at regular blog posting, I’ve always liked to write. I started off, as many do I think these days, writing fanfiction. Truly, dreadful fanfiction but the more you write, the more you learn about writing. You start seeing the plot holes, you start learning about pacing and conflict, you learn to show rather than tell. Every story you write you learn a little more about crafting stories and fanfiction, for all it’s bad press, does give you a vehicle to practice story crafting. Eventually though the ideas can’t be constrained by someone else’s universe and you have to make your own.

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