Nanowrimo, I did it....but please can I sleep now?

I am soooooooooooooooo tired. I ought to be happy, but I feel kind of numb.

I'm taking that as a natural let down after working so hard at something and then it being done.

You know when you're at school or college and you spend weeks researching and writing an essay, or months revising for your exams.....and then it's all over and you don't quite know what to do with yourself?

Or if you perform, the months of putting an act together, refining and practising it, getting the adrenaline rush before performing it............and then there's the come down, the emptiness and the 'what now?'

Well, I think the fud I'm now in is something like all of that.

Nanowrimo was a fantastic experience and I'm so glad I tried it and stuck with it. I learnt so much about writing and about myself, for instance:

1. I desperately need to read more than I do if I am serious about writing. Having now tried to write a novel, I now know what I want to look out for when I read 'proper' writers doing it ;)
2. I CAN write 50,000 words in a month. And despite a lot of them being rubbish and there being huge holes in my plot...there was a lot of good stuff too.
3. Writing without a plot IS a worthwhile thing to do. I started writing the novel on November 1st with an idea about what the plot would do, with a beginning  and an end and thought that was a good plan. It didn't actually work out like that, I found I was writing too much of a memoir rather than a novel that I could enjoy writing. So in order to keep on track I had to abandon my plan and write where my story took me instead. That turned out to be much more fun, far more intuituve and has given me much better quality stuff to go on and work with.
4. Silencing my inner editor (the urge to go back and delete stuff 'not good enough', to check spellings or go off on a tangent researching background facts) was a lot easier than I thought and a very beneficial thing to aid creativity.
5. If writing using a computer (which was pretty necessary to enable getting to 50,000 words within one month and being able to upload them to be verified) then I work best away from my normal 'office' area on a laptop at my dressing table (now my 'writing desk') in my bedroom. It felt more special, more away from the 'normal world' and made writing far easier.
6. But I also want to now try writing with a pen and notebook and experimenting trying writing in different environments - coffee shops, libraries etc...I didn't feel I had the time within the nanowrimo month to try these things out.
7. To get anything good, I need to write for AT LEAST 20 minute blocks....but the ideal length of time for writing blocks seemed to be about 45 minutes.

Anyway, job done and at some point I will go back and re-read what I wrote and try editing and re-writing, but for now I'm done writing for at least a month and it's time to have some making fun :)

It's Christmas and one thing I adore about Christmas is decorating the house....and as you know I have the world's brownest house that is about 3 times as big as my diddy little cottage in the UK...so I'm going to need to make a lot of bright, cheery, colourful, glittery decorations to deal with this - and I'm up for the challenge.

So bring on the glitter, the glue and the scissors, I feel it's time for the woman once called the MacGyver of Burlesque to get making! I'll also be passing on links to some of my favourite Christmas decoration making websites in case you want to join me.

Merry Christmas everyone!

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