“Consummatum est!” Translation from Spanish: ”It is finished!” -Jose Rizal, Filipino Nationalist
Oh wow, I guess this is it. I thought that there were 31 days in November this whole time and I thought it was going to be one more random post before the final post of NaNoWriMo but here we are.
I started this blog as an idea that I needed to engage my brain in a better way, something better than video games and Reddit or random youtube videos until I passed out at night. I wanted to do something that would force me to share more about my personal life, learn and understand what makes better writing and share it with the world.
I have written about so many things, ranging from useless fleeting thoughts to the historical figure Wernher von Braun to some short stories based off of random prompts I found on the internet.
I wrote everywhere, a friends apartment, Starbucks, a train, even a bar while watching football and more.
It was fun forcing myself to call the night early and take some time to write around 10 PM usually when nothing was going on and I was just wasting time that could have been better utilized. I have found that I sleep better now after writing. I lay down and for an hour or two I just relax and when I am done, I post, tweet about it and just drift off to sleep and I haven’t suffered from the nightmares what were haunting me even as recently as late October.
The real purpose of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is a celebration of writing and the goal is to write 50,000 words and create a novel in one month. Not to edit and revise, not to think and be super meticulous. Just, write. Idea? write it? plotline? put it down. Just get everything out there and force yourself to chug it out and at the end of the month you will have a hell of a lot of things to do like editing and revising but that’s December’s problem.
I would have loved to have done this but with my moving out of my apartment on the First of November, living in hostels, then my friends apartment for two weeks, then moving to a new city I knew there was absolutely no chance that I could possibly sit down and write a coherent (or even semi-coherent) story of greater than 50,000 words. My goal is that next year I will get back to NaNoWriMo and successfully complete it. Who knows where my life will take me then and if it would even be possible but that is what I am hoping to do.
As for true winners of NaNoWriMo, I want to give a shoutout to my fellow Womble and Nerdfighter Marlena for completing her story three days early with 50,209 words, all in German. This is even more impressive to me with the differences between the English and German language, even if German is her native language.
I know how hard it is. I have attempted NaNoWriMo 5 times in earnest and I only completed it twice but I never did anything with the stories after it. I did it, I was happy but I never pursued making it cleaner. I regret that a little but I think it was for the best because leaving those stories behind, which I wasn’t super happy with, gave me the ability to work on other things I cared about but I hope that next time I complete NaNoWriMo, I will take the initiative to edit, review and make the story something worth releasing to the world.
What’s Next?
It would be honestly ridiculous, in my opinion, to think that I could easily write a blog post every day and be able to do the other things I normally did, study German, play video games, go out, that I know I sacrificed for this blog. I know playing video games every night is a bad idea but considering I haven’t played a video game in almost a month, I think it’s fair to jump back in a bit. I haven’t done Duolingo to keep up with German at all in November, so I need to take care of that, I haven’t read much at all in the last month and so I will get back into that as well.
As for what is next with the blog. My hope is to write twice a week. It will be less than that but that is the total goal. One midweek post, just about anything. It will be longer and more thought out and edited than any of these 30 posts were and I hope that makes them more enjoyable. Then on the weekends, I hope to write a little bit of fiction. I will probably write a bit more of the short stories I have started already but I don’t know how long that will go on for.
My hope is a little fiction, a little non-fiction each week to keep training and engaging my brain.
Thank you so much to anyone who read all my posts, and even if this was your first post or the last post you will read I appreciate you.
This blog was a great idea because without sharing it to the world, I don’t think I would have ever found the idea of writing every day in a journal style interesting at all and I probably would have given up much, much earlier.