NaNoWriMo 2020

[galadriel1010]

December 1st has rolled around again, and another year of NaNo is behind me. I set out with such good intentions...

My lifetime NaNo stats at the end of the 2020 edition:
15 times competed
8 times won
>589000 words written

This year added 1 attempt, 1 win, and 51,136 words to the totals. Of that, 28812 were on Birthright, my 'official' NaNo project, and the remainder were spread between a for-fun fanfiction project and three exchange works.

It was also my third (non-consecutive) year as an ML for Yorkshire, which was fun and strange this year. We had amazing support from one of our Wrimos who does IT support for the University of York, who very kindly agreed to let us use their Zoom room to host our write-ins. Overall we had over 140 people join our Discord server over the month, taking us up to 355 members in total, and someone let me loose in the admin panel so the number of channels exploded from 6 to over 30. As Yorkshire is quite a large region geographically it's been a long time since we were able to gather the whole region together, so it was nice to be able to hang out with people from the far flung corners of Hull. We even had people join us from other regions, and a write-in visit from Sushi on her world tour. Hopefully next year will be more back to normal, but there's a lot from this year I'm hoping we can keep too.

As for my writing, it went a bit like this:

The projects
Birthright: The story of three women scrambling to avoid the throne of a city state on the verge of rebellion at the edge of an empire. Sort of. I don't really know, and in many ways that was the problem with this project. I had planned to spend all of October doing world-building for it, preparing the groundwork so I could set off at full speed in November. Instead I wrote Sherlock fanfiction, and therefore spent too much of November actually naming major characters and working out their relations to each other, their personalities and goals. I did get some good worldbuilding done, including a couple of very rough maps and a description of the geomorphology of my main setting, but in terms of plot I only really dipped a toe into the second chapter and my protagonists didn't even meet each other. This one needs a lot more work before I'm ready to give it another go, and I need to fall in love with the story all over again.

Nine Lessons And Carol: This is, as far as I can tell, the only Mycroft/Lestrade/Lestrade's wife fic on AO3, and I am absolutely loving it. Mrs Holmes needs more love. In this story she's a Geography teacher called Carol who's utterly in love with both her boys, and well aware she's the luckiest woman in London. At the moment I've got through from 1992 to 2005, so they've all changed quite a lot along the way, and the shit is about to hit the fan properly. I've also introduced Rudy in this one, and I'm a bit in love with him too. I really hope people like my versions of these characters who only get a mention in canon. Whether they do or not, I have a lot of stories to tell in this little universe.

Exchange fics: I've signed up for Holmestice, Yuletide and Mistletoe this year. Homestice is submitted with gifts revealed today, Yuletide needs a final polish, and Mistletoe is... least said, soonest mended? I've worked out what I need to do to fix it though.