I did not post last month….I had a vague thought of doing so….but I was running away from that beast: NaNoWriMo.

And guess what? I got away! Glory hallelujah, it is over! So I thought I’d recap my experience during the month of November with quips, anecdotes, and gifs.

This is my third time participating in NaNoWriMo. I was already about 20,000 words into the story I decided to do for the challenge and, since I had quite a few more ideas for the novel, I thought I would see if I could write 50,000 more words.

It started out well. I knew where I was going and found myself meeting the word limit fairly easily for the first week or so.

This, of course, was in part because I had a copious supply of tea and movie/tv show soundtracks to help me along the way. I’d like to thank Twinings tea at this point for their unintentional sponsorship of an aspiring author.

By the time I reached the second week, I was a little suspicious. This NaNoWriMo was almost too easy…I hadn’t hit a road block yet, which I usually do by the fifth or sixth day. I started to second guess myself, wondering if I was missing something important…had skipped a full scene or something like that…I mean, last time I did this challenge, I ended up writing an entire wedding scene that was not a part of the original plot!

But no, everything was in order…aside from my urge to tweak every sentence until it was as grammatically perfect as I could make it be.

Then we reached that muddled point of the challenge: the week leading up to Thanksgiving. Everyone was getting into holiday mode, there were tons of recipes to make, decorations to put up, and final projects of students that I had to go over at work…and motivation and time started to slip from me.

My family also had more time to spend together, which is always a lovely thing, and I found myself  watching a lot of British shows. So. Many. British. Shows. Particularly The Crown and Inspector Lewis, both of which I love….the problem is, I started to make my characters sound British, even going so far as to use “bloody bastard” and “presumably” quite often in my book. My characters are in a made up country, they are not supposed to be British, I never imagined them with accents….but they certainly had them now and I couldn’t change it because I didn’t have time to edit!

But I made do, I pressed on, because there’s nothing else you can do when you have a deadline to meet. Also, since I started writing whenever I had a free chance, lugging around my black notebook during every lunch break or spare moment between appointments (and yes, I wrote the whole thing by hand, I think I lost what little sanity I have left), people started to notice and ask what I was doing. Their response was invariably:

My response:

Thanksgiving passed with much laughter, fun, and joy, and then we were down to the last few days. I started to notice something that has never happened to me when I did this challenge before: I was irritated…like…all the time.

I turned into Writer-zilla. I would snap at everybody. (I am so sorry for those of you who had to put up with that, I don’t know what came over me). I still had plenty of ideas to write, so it wasn’t that I had writer’s block, I was just so tired of writing.

And I really felt like doing this to my story:

I still don’t know why. My story did not take any unexpected turns, I can actually bear to look at it, but I guess I can’t escape NaNoWriMo unscathed in some way. Again, I apologize for the monstrosity that was Ali O’Leary the last few days of November.

But with much struggle, angst, and turmoil, I finished.

Well. I should rephrase. I hit 50,000 words. But…I am still not done!

I haven’t reached the end of my story….I still have two more castles to level. The end is at least another 20,000 words away.

So…I’m done, but I’m not done. For my health and sanity though, I am taking at least a couple weeks off. Putting the novel out of sight, out of mind, because otherwise I might end up looking something like this:

Which is just no good for anybody. So yes, that is my NaNoWriMo 2016 experience…put down for posterity through an overuse of gifs.

What about you, lovely readers? Did you do NaNoWriMo? What was your experience like?