A little reflection on the November Writing Initiatives is probably due.

NaBloPoMo: Success. 30 days of continual posting. 37 posts in all. What exactly did all that accomplish? Getting back in the habit, I suppose. But after nearly six years of graduate school, I already know that I can undertake an incremental (and seemingly pointless, depending on who you ask) project and push it along for however long it takes. Nobody makes me blog, and nobody is forcing me to write a dissertation, either.

InaDwriMo: Fail or Not Fail? It’s a little hard to tell. I wasn’t sure what a reasonable goal was, so I set it at 20,000 words because that was definitely enough to push me. If I wrote a page a day, then it was high. If I wrote 1,000 words a day, then it was low enough to allow for weekends. All of that assumes incremental writing, of course.

I did not manage to break my terrible writing habits, since I still binge wrote. I actually ended at 10,006 words, but didn’t update the meter in time for that last 1200 words to count. 10,000 words — 40 pages, give or take — is not a bad month’s work. But I was sorting through prior work, putting it together in some sort of logical order, and writing connective tissue, so I had hoped to do more than that. If I had written every day, I’m pretty sure I would have.

It did accomplish some concrete things, aside from just page counts. I have enough of a chapter that I was comfortable sending it over to Compatriot G for preliminary comments. I can see the shape of what’s there. I can see more clearly what I need to be reading. The process dumped me out of the meta-obsessing and fragment creation I’ve been doing and into the process of construction, which is what needed to happen. So, in the end: word count, FAIL. But process-wise? Success.