I didn't really participate in NaNo this year -- nor have I ever, except that one time I made a 24 page comic in a month, which was really NaNo anyway -- but I did put down 58k words on, well, not paper?... the screen? in just over a month.
This exercise has been really instructive to me. I wrote a book, once. Actually, I've written a few, and they've taken *years* to get a first draft out. This book was mad, unfettered writing. It helped that I had a structure and an ending ready to go, and the plot beats I wanted to hit were both tropes in the genre and beats I had already been thinking about. What shocked me is how easily it all flowed out.
I have a lot of work to go on the story. There's themes I want to bring out that have become more clear now that the book is done, relationships to explore, the entire beginning needs work. But that's okay! This was about writing because I wanted to write a story, you know, for fun. I talked about it in an earlier post:
There is no profit motive here, no illusion that this is going to make me money. When it's done I'm going to put it up pay what you want on itch and serialize it across my sites. And then I'll move on to the next one.
-donut