So. I started it. I already said I was going to do NaNoWriMo in my last post, but it’s officially on the website now. Here is the link if you’re curious to see my progress.

However, I failed. I got into my head. As the website puts it, you really have to just write, no matter how good or bad the writing is, in order to meet the goal of 50,000 words in a single month. But I went back. I looked at what I’d written, and found it lacking. I thought about how I could improve it. For the first 14,000 words, I was in a flow, continuing the narrative and constantly thinking about where it was going. But now, I couldn’t think of anything other than where it had been.

I got to just under 1/3 of the way to 50000 words, and I had to stop. I became too obsessed with going back to what had already happened that I couldn’t see what the future of the story should be, much less the present. I felt lost.

Sounds like a metaphor or something, doesn’t it?

But my failure has not dissuaded me from participating in the future, or even from finishing the story I started. It’s been a dream of mine for a long time to have written a book. Little did I know how hard writing a book is, just to have eventually written a book. I still think that the 14,000 words I did write so far are impressive, and I want to continue to work on the book this month. I guess I just had to take a break to get out of my head. Next year, I’ll try again, and try harder.

But there are a few things that I think I learned beyond how important it is to not get into your head while doing something like this. Like I said in my last post on the subject, I think that I want to continue to budget my time better so I can accomplish more goals not related to what I must do, but rather what I want to do in order to enrich my life. I think that over the month of December, I’m going to set aside more dedicated reading time, especially given how much time I’m going to have not at school, and how relaxed my finals week will likely be (I only have one real final).

But one thing that was missing from NaNoWriMo was accountability. So I’ve decided I’m going to start keeping a reading list here on this site, as a way to not only keep track of my reading for myself, but also so that if anyone actually reads this other than myself, they might have an idea of what kind of books I read. You can find the new list of books here.