“Supercalifragilisticexpalidocious” is impressive, but bad padding – it’s only a single word.

Ha ha! Very true, irrevenoid.

I agree with you; some of the tactics people use to “win” NaNo do result in a mess, but I think that so long as we use the challenge as a growth experience, it is a valuable one in terms of improving both craft and confidence.

Congrats on your own NaNo successes!

The first year of NaNo I didn’t really understand how big 50,000 words was. I just knew it was an imposing goal and I did whatever was necessary to reach it (within reason). The result was an incoherent mess with some surprisingly good nuggets scattered through it. (In my opinion anyway. ).

BUT – without that rambling monstrosity (and the shiny ‘Winner’ icon that came with it), I wouldn’t have built the confidence to pursue my NaNo goal this year – an actual pre-thought, pre-outlined novel where 50k words actually wasn’t ENOUGH!

This year’s NaNo is flawed in all-new ways (pacing and character development, for example) which is AWESOME! That’s growth.

I notice it’s your third year and I notice you published this vid just BEFORE NaNo 09. I suspect it demonstrates how much you benefitted from previous years and I bet your NaNo this year was considerably better for it.

Congrats on the vid and congrats on successfully completing NaNo again.

P.S. “Supercalifragilisticexpalidocious” is impressive, but bad padding – it’s only a single word.

bkgain (and anyone else who has difficulty hearing the vocal track): The video is closed captioned. To turn on captioning, mouse over the up arrow at the bottom right corner of the player, then click on the CC icon which should appear above the arrow. (It looks like you need to watch the video on its YouTube page to do this. The menu items from that arrow are different in the embedded player.)

Good Luck with the contest!