Well, it’s over, and I’ve managed to come up with 50,779 words. I officially finished on 11/27/2007 at 18:41 EST.
It was quite an experience. I’m not as disgusted with my work as I thought I would 
be, although, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I do not think it is good by any sort of professional standards. But, I learned a lot from the experience.
First: writing first without worrying about quality is the quickest way to get your ideas out of your head and onto the screen/paper. It doesn’t matter if they are a little incoherent, or if they repeat themselves, or don’t quite strike directly at the heart of the issue you are trying to elucidate. Just get them down, and tinker with them later. If you wait until you have the perfect words in your head, you will never write anything.
Second: writing before you know exactly what you are writing can really reveal what you mean to say. By which I mean to say, you will surprise yourself if you just sit down and write. Many times I did not know what was going to happen next, until the words appeared on the screen
Third: Writer’s block doesn’t seem to be much of an issue for me. Not once during the entire month did I sit and stare blankly at the screen. Whenever I sat down to write, the words flowed from my fingertips. This doesn’t mean they were great, or even good words, but I got them out, and I can always go and edit them later. This may be the most important lesson, for when combined with the first two, I realize that my biggest block is not lack of ideas, but lack of discipline. I have always heard that the hardest thing about writing, and the most important thing, is to get your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard. If I make the time to write, I will become a better writer.
Also, while procrastinating, I found a thread of resentment running through the web. Apparently, there are quite a few people who really loathe NaNoWriMo. Most of their arguments seem to run in the vein of “There’s too much crap out there already, so why add to it?” I must say that I really don’t understand this at all. I’m sure there are people who finished November and are already sending their manuscripts to agents and publishers, but of the many thousand who “won” I’d be stunned if it were more than a handful. For everyone else, I doubt if most of their manuscripts will ever even see paper, let alone an agent’s slush pile. So why would any of this contribute to the crap heap? Maybe these people just are sick of seeing really bad writing (I know it wears on me), but I can’t help feel that they are more concerned that people are walking away from NaNoWriMo saying “I’m a novelist!” and that is what irks them the most. They are the arbiters of what a real novelist is and how dare anyone else have the temerity to say something like that about themselves without having been pre-approved by these arbiters!
And this guy must really hate me, if he were even aware of my existence. I especially like the comment, “to the NaNoWriMo people, writing a novel is like running a marathon, something difficult and strenuous that you do only so you can say you did it before you died.” True, this is one of the reasons I participated, but I also did it to see if it would help improve my writing skills. While I cannot say for certain that it improved my skills, it certainly illuminated them. Apparently, he thinks this way of looking at it diminishes the skill required to write a novel. In my case, all it did was clearly illustrate how difficult it is to write a good novel.
I do not think that my novel will be published in any way whatsoever, nor do I want it to be. I have not looked back at any of the words I have written since I wrote them, but I am certain that it is a bad novel. I do think, though, that in January I will revisit it and edit it, tighten it up a bit. The only true goal I have for the finished work is to one day perhaps read it to my child.
Which reminds me, if you did not pick up on it from my posts while I was traveling in England, S is pregnant with our first, due in March.