So I wrote for Nanowrimo in November. Sort of.
As you may recall, I planned to continue a story I had already started writing, in fact, one I had already tried to Nano once (back in 2015). I first had to convert all the hand-written pages to computerese. This took rather more time than I had thought it would, partly due to lousy handwriting (even I can't read my own writing), partly due to lousy storage resorting in blocks of text being mostly erased, and partly due to the fact that I am really, really lazy. It took me, in fact, until November 15th to actually start writing new text.
That pretty much guaranteed I wasn't going to win, so it couldn't have worked out better if I had done it on purpose. I still managed to write about 1200 words a day. The busiest day was November 19th, with 1631 words; the least busy was probably November 25th, with 388 words. My total words for the 15 days I wrote were 15 614 words. This not only doubled the length of the manuscript, it also set a new personal record for Nano, as previously I wrote 12 279 words (that was 2017).
One of the reasons for the slow-down in the middle (a three-day period November 24-26) was that I was hit with a surprise romance sub-plot (okay, it wasn't that much of a surprise) and decided to include a somewhat explicit sex scene. You know, to stretch my writerly muscles, leave my comfort zone, that sort of thing. And when I look back at it, you know, it was really pretty terrible. The best news is that no one but me will ever read it. Should I ever show the manuscript to anyone else, I will make sure to delete that scene first. Of course, first I would have to finish it. There seems little risk of that.
So, yeah. That was my NaNoWriMo for 2018. I don't do well with goals that require a certain number of words per day; I do better with a certain amount of time spent writing per day. My goal now is to write for 15 minutes each day.
