Miss the Finish Line? That’s Okay!

With the end of November came the end of National Novel Writing Month, 2019. I want to start off by saying congrats to all of those aspiring authors and authors out there who pulled of their 50k goal.

For those of you who didn’t make it to the finish line, much like myself, it’s okay.

It might feel like you failed on some level. For a brief moment, I honestly felt like I failed again. But you know what? We didn’t. We wrote, we wrote hard and we made the time to try to hit a pretty ambitious goal, booking late coffee-filled nights, putting off plans with friends and family, WRITING in the midst of a MAJOR holiday!! Trying to accomplish NaNo around Thanksgiving time…man alive, that’s a task. Thinking about writing when you’re stuffed to the brim with all the turkey day fixings is just not feasible. At least not for me. I ate so much, you guys. SO MUCH. And it was all delicious.

With this years NaNo, like Thanksgiving binge eating, I achieved so much. I wrote like a maniac, made considerable headway in a novel that’s been sitting stagnant and started a new venture with my Army of Outlaw series on Patreon. I honestly think that if a really nasty cold hadn’t taken me out for several days, I would have made that 50k.

But not making it doesn’t mean I lost.

Writing anything is a win when it comes to being a writer. A sentence, a paragraph, an outline…anything is a win. You make an effort to string words together in a way that’s informative and aesthetically pleasing. It sounds simple, like it should be easy to just do that continually throughout the day.

But it’s not.

There is nothing simple about writing something personal that means a great deal to you. It’s an agonizing, doubt-filled, exhausting process and you deserve credit for even trying to attempt writing a novel/book/poem/etc.

So to everyone out there who came up short…good job!! I’m super proud of you and every effort you made to hit that 50k! You’re all rockstars!!

Now…keep going. Because that creation you have in your head needs to be written, whether it takes you a month, a year or more.