Ain't here

Thanks to HostRocket, there are no 2006 posts saved for posterity.

To summarize my 2006 NaNo experience: I wrote fanfic, a traditional mystery called Trixie Belden and the Mystery at Turtle Cove, which was inspired by my May 2006 trip to the real Turtle Cove Environmental Research Station. It was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. The idea for the story occurred to me when I was on my trip, and I thought NaNo would be a good time to write it.

Writing the novel was painful, and I pretty much hated every word that I wrote. Basically, I think the problem was that the mystery, as I had planned it, probably was only worthy of 20-25K words. Stretching to 50K made it tedious and boring and required a lot of unnecessary background information.

I hit my 50K words, but for the first time ever, I did not finish the novel. On November 30, the night I had planned to come home and finish the novel (I was close), I came home to a vandalized and robbed house. Needless to say, after the last cop left at 2 a.m., finishing a novel I hated was no longer a priority, and the deadline had passed anyway. I woke up the next morning to find that my online "home" was gone, too. HostRocket had managed to delete everything but offered no backup.

I had decided halfway through the month that I was going to rewrite the novel. Which I still need to do.

And that's my NaNo 2006 in a nutshell.