exactly how i feel!!! i won the first year. lost my steam after that. it seems like every year, my word count goes down. Good Luck

@Lillyfield41 Thank you for the encouragement. I added you as a writing buddy. Do you try to set a writing schedule, or just fit it in whenever you can? I'm sure you can regain your past success. Your profile shows that the first year, when you won the challenge, you wrote a science fiction novel. Did you complete it in editing? Did you ever try to get it published?

@resserts i self-published. i revised sevy 7 times, and i think i'm finally finished with it. i have to move on. it's not my opus, it's just a story that i needed to tell. when the octopuses, from 'rise of the octopuses' (an unfinished work of mine) crept into the story, i knew it was time to move on. i have some goals of attending some book shows and trying to get some copies sold, but that keeps feeling overwhelming and i have other things that occupy my time and money. i adore making the covers. i actually want to fuck off my 9-5 job today to work on the cover of the mirror. i need to title the story first before i work on a cover (first things first). i think it may have the word tradition in the title - now i've gone down a fork of distraction road. in answer to your question, do i schedule writing? oh fuck no! i would be living in disappointment every day of my life. (not that i don't have stretches of time where that is reality, but i at least get a respite from it now and then.) i am what some call a 'pantser', meaning i write by the seat of my pants. (as opposed to a plotter, who outlines and plans their story before writing.)

@Lillyfield41 The first year I approached NaNoWriMo with no idea what I'd write — no plot, no characters, not even the slightest idea — intentionally a blank slate so I wouldn't be invested in the outcome, instead treating it like a writing exercise. I think for my more important writing ideas I'll necessarily have an outline. Pretty much every idea I have I think to death and, even if I don't write it down, I still have a pretty solid structure in mind.

I wish it weren't so difficult to get published through traditional channels. It's not always about quality, but some books are rejected because they don't have a wide enough appeal, so the audience is considered too small to justify the printing. Fortunately, that's changed somewhat with the advent of inexpensive on-demand printing for short runs. A friend of mine is a published author (mostly children's informational books, in addition to articles children's periodicals), and she was explaining to me how difficult getting published is for non-celebrities — how most publishers won't work with authors directly and require working through an agent, so the trick is to get picked up by an agent with clout in the publishing industry to have any real hope of getting published. The problem is that there aren't many agents willing to work with the smaller publishing houses because the agents want the bigger commissions, so it's often far more difficult to get an agent than to land a publisher. Is it any wonder so many people self-publish through Amazon and the like?

@resserts where are the publishers on this site reading your insightful words??? why aren't they messaging you to send you some work???