So, ten minutes ago, roughly, I finished this year's NaNo project, coming in at just a hair over 50k words. While other years have been easy, this year, the project has been a struggle, and I had to fight to finish. In analyzing it, I've learned that I much prefer short stories and essays to novel length work, at least as a writer, though I do think some stories require the length of a novel to be told well. Though it may not seem so here, I guess I'm just naturally concise.
I've pretty much decided that this will be my last year with this project. I've completed it three years in a row, and never bothered to go back and edit. This time, some of the material I've generated, I WANT to edit, and I'm flirting with going back to the old stuff, and making it actually saleable as well. Too, I don't need NaNo to MAKE me write. I write anyway. I may not blog every day, but that's just one part of what I'm doing.
You'll notice that I've not posted any of what I've written for this project. There's a reason for that – I don't like posting raw forms of stories. Oh, I do it on moonchilde.com with OneWord and prompts, but those are completely different sorts of exercises.
That being said? I've enjoyed my time with NaNoWriMo, I just don't NEED it any more.