NaNoWriMo retrospective

Not surprisingly (well, to me), I hit about 35,000 words by the end of November. There are four reasons this isn't surprising to me.

• Five days in, I switched stories. The first one just wasn't doing it for me.
• This just isn't a 50,000 word story. I think it will top out at about 43,000. I realized that about the 27th.
• We're in the process of packing the apartment, which is a huge timesuck. (Also, the process of buying a house leaves one brain dead at certain stages.)
  
• I haven't been able to do 50,000 in a month since I started working fulltime. Thanksgiving weekend hurts more than it helps.

That said, I know more or less where this is going, unlike my previous two NaNo stories, so I'll probably keep writing through the end of it before skipping back to something else. I just need to get my characters out of the woods east of Lake Baikal and back to Istanbul, which is taking longer than I expected.

I don't think I'm going to try historical fiction for NaNoWriMo again; it takes too much work to do right (looking up the names and/or existence of towns in 1906, etc.) for something with a sharp deadline.