NaNoWriMo has come to an end. Overall, I didn’t make the goal for the first time, but I learned a how to streamline my style and I’m proud of the work I did.

I finished with 34,417 of 50,000 words.

In the final week I had written 16,654 words which means if I’d been able to focus like that for one more week, I could have made the goal. This is an important detail to me because it was a busy month and 9 days total were spent not writing at all.

Now I know I’m fast enough to do a draft in a month with a solid outline.

The most important thing to come from this challenge is how well the outline helped me. The first book I wrote had a basic outline, but I kept adding and removing chapters as I went along – more like pantsing. With this new process I was focused more on blocking the chapters and fleshing them out later.
As I did so, would realize I wanted to go into something that required a chapter before it or to change something in a chapter earlier. I’d add the chapter with rough notes and flesh it out later.

This is far more efficient than my previous attempt at the first book which has taken years to get a solid draft that I submitted for editing. I can now go back to the second revision of that book and make changes that I want to reflect in the second.

I didn’t “win” the challenge, but what I took away from it, was knowing what works better for me.