NaNoWriMo #Fail

For some reason, I was a little nervous about opening my Inbox today. Now that it's December 1st, and I did not, in fact, write 50,000 words of scintillating novel copy, I half expected the NaNoWriMo folks to chew me out by e-mail.

I imagined something along these lines...

Dear Christa,
Remember the movie Elf and how that big doofus in yellow tights played by Will Ferrell couldn't meet his quota of Etch a Sketches?

Well, I regret to inform you that you and him share something significant in common since you're approximately 46,303 words short of your NaNoWriMo goal of a mere 50,000 words in November.

Basically, unlike your industrious writer peers who lead equally busy lives, you were a ginormous slacker. And for that utter slackdom, we've now nicknamed you, Christa A. Banister, "Epic Fail." We can only hope that next year you'll step up your game in a serious way.

We'd wish you a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays but we're not sure if you deserve that.

Regards,
The Esteemed NaNoWriMo Team

Of course, I didn't get an e-mail scolding from NaNoWriMo at all—even if I probably should've. But even if I wasn't quite as ambitious as I hoped, however, I still feel that signing up was a good idea because I wrote nearly 3,700 words of new copy. And for the first time in a good, long while, I wasn't meticulously editing myself as I was doing so.

I felt like a third grader in Mrs. Goffin's English class again, you know when I wrote just for the fun of it and savored every delicious moment along the way. I never edited myself then, and writing never felt like "work." So if I learned anything from the whole NaNoWriMo experiment, it's that switching things up can really help your game, even if you didn't make it all the way to the proverbial endzone.