This is my first year, and I started late. To be honest, it was all in fun. I didn't think I was going to make it, and my mum told me basically the same thing.

She said, "You're not going to manage it, so why even bother? It's wasting time, and you've got your flute exam coming up..." Blah blah blah blah blah. Really great for self-confidence. Not.

But I did make it. I finished over a week early - not something she was expecting. Okay, so it meant skipping lunch and writing in my breaks at school. Okay, so maybe my homework and instrumental practice suffered a little.

But I did it and that's what matters. I'm proud of myself and I'm doing the same thing again next month. Can I write at least 40 000 words before Christmas Day?

We'll see, shall we? I'm on 7000 so far...

Year one, COMPLETE !!! haha, I just finished like ten minutes ago. GOOD FEELING.
I thought it was a pretty traumatic experienc to be fair, full of late for school-ness, shirking of homeworks, and general deglect of everything apart from the essentials.
But, my story isnt finished, far from it in fact, and I STILL haven't got a title.

And when I lost half of my words, I thought, Oh jesus, this is the end. Yet here I am. Just WOOHOO. I don't think I will be participating next year, haha.

Alright, this was my very first NaNoWriMo. And... I finished! YAY!

It was CRAZY! I wound up being far more social than I had planned to. That made writing really hard. It wasn't so much difficult to find things to write about, but to find the time to write.

Then I decided to go away for the last weekend of the month. I was at 35k words. And if you saw my "Insane Dash to the Finish" thread you'll see I was determined to finish NaNo before I went away so I could enjoy my trip guilt-free.

I did it... It was NUTS. Wound up with me writing 15,000 words in a single evening. 9-5AM with several breaks for food and laundry, and the fact that my arms were SO aching. Like, I think I may have possibly done some serious damage to my wrists :\

As for the actual writing experience...

Stuff kept happening that I had no control over! Like characters showing up long before I'd planned to introduce them, then I had planned to kill off one of the secondary characters. The next thing I know my FAVORITE secondary character was being hauled off by soldiers, having sacrificed himself to save his friends. Which is why I loved him.. but I sobbed. I kept yelling at him "No not you!"

Couldn't write any more that night. The next day I wrote the funeral scene and lost all will to write for days. Not a single word. Oiy.

Then the ending was COMPLETELY different than the one I had planned. I could hardly believe it when I wrote it. Like, wow. Even *I* was not expecting that one. No foreshadowing, nada, it just HAPPENED.

Not sure I'll do it next year because I plan to spend the next several years editing and re-writing this one until it's fit to be published. But we'll see.

Another first-timer here. Well, official first-timer. I did an unofficial 30-day novel about three years ago after buying Chris Baty's book.

I really needed this. 2009 has been a crappy year, filled with stress, crises, and general not-so-good-ness. My self-confidence needed a big boost, and by gum, I got me one.

The fact that wove bits of myself into my main character helped a lot, as did the fact that I set the story in my home city. Another help was my decision to boost my daily word target to 2,000 and aim for a 60,000 word draft. And yet another help was all of you good folks, updating your counts, offering encouragement, and making wacky comments that had nothing to do with anything (oh, wait, that last one was my job, wasn't it?)

For the most part, the writing flowed pretty well, and I even found myself pleased with the few passages I actually took the time to glance over later (I know, that's a NaNo no-no, but I only did it a couple of times, and I did not edit anything. Not a syllable.) I had a couple of days where the words didn't come, or came reluctantly, but those days were few and far between.

My final breakthrough, my discovery of the ending, occurred on Saturday, and it motivated me produce my biggest single-day word count of the whole month. And I finished the story two days early.

The reluctance to actually sit down and write never went away. It happened every day, and I would fuss with things, check e-mail, check Protagonize, check Twitter, and then check something else again, before knuckling down and writing the day's quota. Once I started, though, I tended to sail on through to my daily quota or beyond.

My best friend this past month has been Write or Die! Damn thing really works.

Gad, I'm verbose!

@ElzuWolfe

My experience this year with NaNoWriMo was my first. I honestly didn't think I was gonna win when I sarted, but I had a lot of fun doing it. (I also now have a lot of homework to catch up on, ha ha)
x x x

I've been failing NaNo since 2004 and so winning this year was a pleasant surprise. I usually enter into it expecting failure (but hoping for success) and this year was no different. I'm not really sure what happened.

As for how I felt doing it, I don't know. It was just something I did. I had a goal I had to achieve everyday and so I just did it without thought. I approached the entire things fairly mechanically and methodically and it seemed to work for me this year.

Certainly I'm damn pleased with myself but oddly I'm not finding my self elated per se

@darkliquid said:

As for how I felt doing it, I don't know. It was just something I did. I had a goal I had to achieve everyday and so I just did it without thought. I approached the entire things fairly mechanically and methodically...

That's very similar to how I'm feeling about it. Definitely felt like one hell of an accomplishment but, even though this was my first year, I never really doubted that I would finish.

I was never behind at any point and I never had a big word count day, out of desire or need. I think that's the only way I could do it. Just kept chipping away at it. It's kind of shocking how much writing you can get done that way.

Must resist temptation to be that productive every month.

Anyway. I'm glad it's done and I'll definitely be doing it next year. I put up a lengthy post on my blog if anyone wants to read more of my thoughts.

Oh, speaking of which - did anyone else get their novel considered for the 30 Covers, 30 Days project? Mine was in the first batch to be handed over to the artist but wasn't picked, obviously. I found that really helped me to get a running start on things, just the chance of being selected.

I'm gonna hush now.