A brief history of my National Novel Writing Months (the achievements, not the plots). It’s a thing. It’s back.

2002 - Pure win. It was a terribly wonderful story that has been lost to the ages. Last I knew the only copy that still existed was a binder in the trunk of The Sister’s car but that was probably five years ago.

2003 - Pure win. This was the year my Epic Story was first attempted. It was appropriately ridiculous for a high-schooler.

2004 - Fail, got halfway. First year at college. I may have stopped halfway through because see point one.

2005 - Pure win based on 17,000 words in the last 4 days of the month. 17k that was wiped from the file next time I checked on it.

2006 - Pure win. Attempt two at Epic Story, trying to focus the timeline, shifting the plot, etc. It was more tightly planned, but still spiraled away after the month was over.

2007 - Fail, got halfway. Heavily influenced by the Beckett class I was taking. I was also the Waco ML, and between that and it being my senior year of undergrad, I did not hit 50k. I did turn in a section of this as part of my final for the Beckett class, though.

2008 - Altered goal win. Grad school year one. Started one story, abandoned, then decided to go back to the 2005 story and write 25,000 more on that instead.

2009 - Severely altered goal win. Grad school + internship + two part time jobs meant I worked on some short pieces instead.

2010 - Altered goal win. First month at a new full-time job. Altered goal to bring an existing story to 50k and I won, I won but good. I’m still finishing this story very slowly.

2011 - I’m going back to the basics.

I will be talking about this. You will be annoyed. I am going to be very loud about NaNo this year.