So, let us not beat around the bush on this one — I failed at NaNoW­riMo. Oh how the end is nigh yadda yadda… to tell you the truth, I’m not at all beaten up about it. My story never took flight, I didn’t enjoy the writ­ing I was doing and all in all, it wasn’t the expe­ri­ence I wanted.

I approached NaNo with a cer­tain expec­ta­tion, an expec­ta­tion that I would eas­ily be able to write 50k words and it would only be the ‘is this any good’ that I would ques­tion. In all real­ity, I over­es­ti­mated my inter­est in the story I had planned to write about. I flip-flopped twice on what story to actu­ally go with and in the end, I just didn’t want it enough and decided to get on with some ama­teur car­pen­try instead (I did just build a win­dow seat / bed, so I did com­plete some­thing I am very happy with).

In ret­ro­spect, I did play for the first four (wow) days, but quickly after my reg­u­lar week set in I realised the sac­ri­fice of my time with my fam­ily — and rest — just wasn’t worth sit­ting at my com­puter, writ­ing some­thing I did not enjoy writing.

The fact that I also got a nice email telling me a short story of mine was being pub­lished was also a rein­vig­o­rat­ing piece of news. It allowed me to accept my NaNo non-accomplishment with­out feel­ing bad at all, and gave me con­fi­dence in my writ­ing in gen­eral and specif­i­cally, my short fic­tion mad­skillz. Inci­den­tally the ‘gig’ also pays — which is also fantastic.

I have been read­ing up on few reg­u­lar weblogs and to those of you doing well, good job. Specif­i­cally, I would like to read It Tastes Like Cop­per by Richard Gal­braith because, well who isn’t a sucker for Vam­pires vs. Marines vs. Zom­bies vs. a bio-enginered badass called, Tokyo Col­lider… nice.

So any­way, don’t feel bad for me (as if). I tried NaNo, and in the end it was less of a a fail­ure in my eyes, but more of some­thing that never even started. I barely made it off the start­ing blocks, so there was no way I was going to cross the fin­ish line… and if I had, it would have been a pathetic flop as opposed to a tri­umphant win.