National Novel Writing Month is over. I both lost and won.

Win: I accomplished my primary goal of completing a first draft of my book idea.

Win/lose: It’s a short book – 31,327 words. I don’t know if it’s expandable enough to publish traditionally, if it’s publishable at all.

Win: Regardless, it was a worthwhile writing experience.

Lose: I didn’t reach the NaNo goal of writing 50,000 words during the month of November.

I finished the book draft on Nov 19th and had planned to continue piling up words with other writing projects. This would have been fun, since I loved adding my word count to the NaNo stats at the end of each writing day. But I decided, in the end, I’d benefit more by devoting the last weeks of the month to other matters, including reading the massive short story collection Family Furnishings by Alice Munro for my book club. For me, NaNo didn’t allow much time to do anything else, and I mean anything.

Congratulations to all those who won/won NaNoWriMo and completed both their drafts and 50,000 words. I know now that is a massive task.