NaNoWriMo: I won! ("won")...but what now?

Hellooo! Just thought I would leave a quick post about NaNoWriMo since it was such an all-consuming part of my life in November. I can't believe it, but I actually made it to 50,000 words! Well, 50,257, to be precise---had to stay true to the tradition I have upheld my entire life of doing the absolute bare minimum to succeed. Woooot.

Anyway, wow, what a month. I admit it was definitely a relief when November ended. I've had aspirations of writing a novel for as long as I can remember, and I've gotten up to 20k or 30k words before but have never finished a book. Not because of anything other than lack of motivation/laziness. So, I really took the NaNo challenge seriously, which meant I was constantly stressed out any time I was doing anything other than writing during my spare time. A few times during the month, I would get on a roll for a few hours and just feel this incredible euphoria, like holy crap I am doing this, I am actually writing a novel, and maybe it's not even all that bad???? But honestly...the majority of the time I was an anxious, self-doubting wreck. I literally had to force myself to sit down on the weekends and do this thing...the moments when it was easy and fun were few and far between. And I shudder to even think what I wrote...

Yep, haven't even opened the document since Thanksgiving. Which is probably really bad, because even though I made it to 50k, I didn't actually finish the "novel" yet. Probably still have another 15k words to go. But I just needed a break to get away from it all. Work also got really intense, and blah blah blah. My plan is to wrap her up over xmas break, then take another break from it, and then start revisions in February or something. Or maybe when I open it up again I'll be so horrified at the verbal diarrhea splattered all over the pages that I'll just hit DELETE and be done with it. Which would be terrible, but at the end of the day I would have still succeeded in writing 50k words in a month, so that's cool. I don't know. NO. I won't do that!! Ahh, here the anxiety is again. Alassss.

Anyway that was/is my NaNoWriMo experience, in a nutshell!