Some NaNo stats of mine for your pleasure:

• This was my sixth year participating, so this gives me a 50% success rate so far.
• I skipped 2007 because I couldn’t think of anything to write. October that year had been hell, and I wasn’t prepared.
• 5 of the 6 stories have been sci-fi [2] and the 6th story was a romantic dramady [3].
• Two of the wins have been with sci-fi and one with the rom-dram. You’d think that I’d stick with the rom-dram since I have a 100% success rate with that genre, as compared to a 40% success rate with sci-fi.
• Over the course of November, I had four days where I wrote 5,000 words or more, meaning that I wrote 40% of the story in four days. If I could only harness that awesome writing power, I could have been done in slightly over a week. [4]

A lot of writers say that sometimes the characters you are writing will sometimes stand up and wrestle control of the story away from you, and it sounds like a lot of malarkey, but there’s a grain of truth to it. For instance, all the way through my story outline, I had two characters named John and Paul. Halfway through the notes, Paul stopped feeling like a “Paul” and decided to become a Jamie. Okay, fine – it’s early enough to change. But then when I started actually writing the story, John stopped acting like a John and started calling himself Liam. And one of the other characters, who was supposed to be a airhead named Bijou, had a great moment near the beginning which made me decide that she wasn’t an airhead and “Bijou” was actually a silly name for her, so she started being called by her nickname, Beez.

And then there was the story. It’s the same story I started working on all the way back in 2003, and it’s carried me all this way without running out of ideas. There’s this space ship, and there’s this crew on this space ship, and they do stuff, and then there’s a conspiracy going on. Last time I wrote about them, in 2006 [5], I wrote the end of the story without actually figuring out what the conspiracy was, so this year I worked on the middle part where more people start finding out about the conspiracy and trying to figure out what’s going on. However, this year I did it from the perspective of a different crew on a different ship which I had mentioned in passing last time – not that I didn’t like the characters, I just wanted a different group of people to do things this time around.

And next year? I had this one character in this year’s story who was absolutely not what I thought he was going to be, so I’m thinking I might have him set out by himself to see what he’ll do with his own story.

[1] There’s a mouthwash for that. You might want to look into it.
[2] They’ve been part of the same story.
[3] Calling it “fiction” seems so pedestrian.
[4] Somewhere, my boss is hollering “if you could have harnessed that awesome writing power, you would have finished those post-project reports months ago!” To which I reply: “pthththtbbbbbb!”
[5] I wrote the rom-dram in 2008.

A few weeks ago, I announced my intention of participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. What I hadn’t mentioned were all the misgivings I had about starting something that I wasn’t certain I could fully commit to. See, I was going to be in Ottawa for a full weekend for Dave’s Movie Marathon (which was a blast, as usual), plus I knew I would be going home for a few days to see my new niece (she’s adorable!). While I knew I would do what I could to work on the story while I was away, I knew it was going to be difficult, there would be major distractions, and I would fall way behind. But hey, I’m no stranger to that having done this a few times before.

What I was not counting on at all was getting sick. And no, it wasn’t H1N1, but it was almost as bad: a cold that kept coming and going for almost two weeks, starting the day after the movie marathon and lasting until this past Thursday. One day, I’d feel fine and the next I’d be out cold. On top of that, I was stressed out about work, so I never really let myself take the time to get better and I’d keep relapsing from something which I should have recovered from in a few days.

At no point in there did I get much chance to work on my story. Over the course of two weeks, I wrote less than 2000 words, which is, as you can guess, not good. I needed a marathon writing session to get me over the hump.

Fortunately, this weekend was free from work obligations, and I vowed to write at least 10,000 words or I was going to pronounce this attempt DOtS [1]. I’ll spare you the suspense and come right out and tell you that I did manage to make my goal, and the finishing line is well within my cramped, writerly grasp now.

In other stuff: I haven’t been to the gym in almost three weeks, what with the travel and the sick. Last week while I was home sick [2], I was watching a program where people were running, and it made me sad. Suffice to say, I’m going to make it in at least twice this week, but I’m not going to overdo it.

In other other stuff: Crazy Off-Key Singing Guy Who Walks With Purpose, a fixture of my neighborhood but who has been missing for the past year, is back. I’m not sure that I can honestly say I missed him.

[1] Dead on the screen. As opposed to the printed page.
[2] I sucked it up for a day and a half and stayed home sick. It was what I should have done from the very beginning.