Today is also the last day of Camp NaNoWriMo. I originally set out with a goal of 35,000 words (8 short stories at about 5,000 words each, with room for some shorter ones), but wound up lowering my goal by 10k in the first few weeks of the month for various reasons. As of writing this post, I have about 20,500 words across pieces of five short stories, two personal poems, and several chapters of a novel. Pretty dang sure I'm not going to whip up another 4,500 words today, but I'm okay with that.
The point of doing a challenge like NaNoWriMo is just getting writing--telling the inner editor to take a long walk off a short pier and getting words on the page. And I'd like to think that's what I've managed to do so far this month.
I started seriously working on the novel that's been percolating through my brain as I worked on other things, and I'm so pleased with that fact. This novel may or may not ever actually see the light of day, but I'm really enjoying writing it and, as I've said multiple times with friends recently, any writing is useful writing.
So, here's a toast to writing 'the book of your soul' and writing bad short stories. Here's to getting the words on the page, no matter what they are.