It’s December 1, and National Novel Writing Month is over for 2012. According to the NaNo website, an estimated 300,000 writers officially took part this year, with 38,373 winning the event by reaching the goal of 50,000 words, and a total of 3,288,976,325 words were written. The Young Writers Program wrote an additional 419,139,457 words.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I did not participate in NaNoWriMo this year, but I did set an unofficial goal of line editing 50,000 words that I had already written. Line editing is a lot faster than writing things the first time, so despite a difficult week in the middle, I came out on top with 61,592 words edited. How did your NaNo experience go? Leave a comment below if you participated.

But now that the month is over, whether you finished or even participated or not, now what? Well, of course, the answer is, keep writing! Your novel isn’t done just because the month is. For one thing, 50,000 words is pretty short for a novel. In fact, it could almost be called a long novella. Even if you won NaNo, there’s a good chance that you have at least 20,000 more words of story that still need to be put on the page. That’s why many writers say that December is National Novel Finishing Month, or NaNoFiMo.

But even more importantly, if you’re a writer, you have to write, and if you only write seriously in November, then you’re missing out on 91.7% of the year. Or maybe you just need a break for the month of December. That’s fine, too; just make sure you pick it back up in 2013.

As for me, there’s not much slowing down here. I probably have enough of a backlog of editing to last me until spring. I’ll post later on with my some of my personal experiences and advice about the editing process, so keep an eye out for that, and, until then, keep writing.