Winning NaNoWriMo for the First Time – Now What?

I won! I wrote 50,000 words in a month! I feel like I could boogie dance around the house right now. Except I can’t dance, so that would be an interesting sight.

But now what? (TLDR Video link at the bottom of the post)

While I did manage to reach the 50K word goal, I did not reach my non-word count goal of finishing the complete first draft. As it stands, the draft is about 65 percent complete, but not in a consecutive and readable manner. So my goal for December will be to complete the last third of the book, and make sure that it is readable.

Then begins the process of editing. And drafting books 2 and 3.

In addition to the writing and editing that I will be doing, I also need to find beta readers, and send my book baby off to get the first bits of feedback from them.

The (vague for now) goal for next year is to work on my confidence levels for sending out my writing for others to critique. I have always been afraid that others won’t like my stories, or that the few people that I send them to (family and friends) only said nice things because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. So the new goal is to send the book baby out into the world and learn to grow a thicker skin when I get critiques back.

In other words, I need to stop being such a thin skinned scaredy cat.

But that is for January. So in the meanwhile, I will be finishing my first draft and editing.

Did you manage to win NaNoWriMo? Leave me a comment and let me know how you did.