After last year's NaNoWriMo loss, I wasn't sure I'd be able to manage a victory this year, but by adopting traits closely resembling concentration and persistence, I somehow succeeded. It took all thirty days, but I was able to write a 50,000-word document that looks roughly like a novel (if one squints, possibly to the point of closing one's eyes entirely).

While I'm not brave enough to share an excerpt from my NaNo-novel, I did want to share a few things that made this year's challenge unique. This year, I...

• attended only one write-in, just to see if my aversion to them had diminished. It hadn't. I lasted thirty minutes before I had to bail, unable to cope with the people and the noise. And just to be clear, by "people", I don't mean fellow novelists; I mean other cafe patrons who seemed intent on being as annoying as possible.
• found Twitter-based word sprints to be great sources of motivation The NaNoWriMo folks set up a special account (@NaNoWordSprints) to lead sprint sessions, which ranged anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes in length. The organizer would tweet "Go!", everyone participating would write furiously for the given amount of time, the organizer would tweet "Stop!", and participants would tweet how many words they had written and share a noteworthy phrase. The sprints were fun to observe and to participate in (silently).
• wrote part of my NaNo-novel in five parks -- two national parks (Yosemite and Pinnacles) and three county parks (Calero, Santa Teresa, and Almaden Quicksilver). It was an idea inspired by this year's "Camp NaNoWriMo" shirt. While the hike-n-writes weren't big word count boosters, they were great idea generators and stress relievers. They also gave me a chance to improve my iPhone thumb-typing skills. Next year, the plan is to hit more parks.

As I do every year, I would like to sum up my NaNoWriMo experience with a few fun statistics:

• Words written: 51,498
• Words written in parks: 2,091
• Highest one-day count: 6,933
• Lowest one-day count: 0
• Percent of novel written on my iPhone: 4.1
• Least productive day of the week: Saturday
• Most productive day of the week: Monday
• Number of writing days: 26
• Number of zero-word days: 4
• Cups of coffee consumed (above "normal"): 17
• Pounds of Skittles eaten: 0 (Shocking, I know!)