Nanowrimo is a wonderful thing. It's a great personal challenge. You write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days in the month of November. If you have always wanted to write a novel and you never have, it's perfect. Challenge yourself to write 1700 words a day, every day for a month and boom! You're a novelist! One more thing off your bucket list! Take a victory lap. Get some sleep.

As I said, a great personal challenge and I've done it three times. November 2011 was the last time. I don't mean the most recent time. I mean the last time.

Last summer I wrote book about a girl and some dragons—a 50,000 word novel in two months. I have a nine-book series planned for that world and those characters and I'd like to put out three of them a year—short, fast, fun reads.

So I had this brilliant idea. I'd do the next book in my dragon series as a Nanowrimo. It would be fun...I remember it being fun. Of course, the last two times I did it I wasn't planning to publish the result.

Normally a sweet-spot writing pace for me is about 1,000 words per day (about four pages). Since I don't write on Sundays (Sundays are crazy, don't get me started) that means I need to double that pace to get 50,000 words in a month. I discovered to my horror that two times a sweet spot isn't twice as sweet.

It's hell.

Don't get me wrong, when genius is boiling (as Jo March would say) and the plot is barreling along, I can exceed the writing speed limit for a day or two.

But then I have to slow it down or the story starts to veer off the road and down a rabbit hole. I spent the majority of November 2011 wandering, bewildered, through every rabbit hole in a three-county area. On December 1, 2011 I had a 50,000-word smoking pile where a book was supposed to be.

Keep in mind this book is the second in a series. I already have a good handle on the characters. I'd done a fair amount of pre-writing in October. I knew who (and what) the bad guy was going to be. I knew what the subplot was going to be and I knew how the major and minor plots would interact and how they would resolve. As November 1st dawned all ducks were in a tidy row. So I thought.

Meh.

It sounds so good in the advertising copy “Allow your creative juices to flow! Censor nothing! Damn the internal editor! Top speed! Fly high in literary abandon and freedom!”

When you are writing in whatever your sweet spot is—whether it's one page a day (250 words) or 10 (2,500 words)—your brain has time to grow ideas. You don't just snatch whatever happens to be lying around on the surface. When you write too fast and too surface-y, your writing ends up looking like you scrounged around in the bargain bin at the cliché store. Some ideas need to be censored. When your internal editor says that passage you just wrote is so stale it would embarrass John Carter of Mars, maybe you need to take the time to give it a second look.

So in the cold morning light of December 1st, I had 50,000 words and a nice certificate congratulating me on my successful completion of Nanowrimo—and a huge, tangled, snarling mess to untangle, unsnarl and unmess. I had to go back down all those rabbit holes and retrieve what was salvageable and cut away the rest.

It's now late January and I'm nearly done. I'm very pleased with what has emerged from the smoking ruin. It's hair-raising where it's supposed to be and funny in all the right places. I kept all the spots where I blew things up. I like to blow things up.

A word to the wise: my clever idea of a book in one month has become a book in three months. Sigh. Live and learn.

Love ya, Nano—but I won't be back.