I'm planning to join, too, JoJo. The novel I worked on last year was done without any plot planned out ahead of time and without the necessary plot-changing research done beforehand, and as a result, it went nowhere. Cause-and-effect storylines like mysteries or certain action-adventures need pre-planning. All that I really did was work out the characters, but not their story.
Anyway, I'd like to work on that novel and see if I can redo it and finish it this time.
BTW, one of my friends here in Colorado did NaNo last year. She started with a book on which she'd written about 18,000 words and then just wrote another 50,000 or 60,000 words to finish it since it was going to be an 80,000 word novel. So she only counted the words she wrote during NaNoWriMo. It was great motivation for her to finish the book.
I figure I can do something like that if I decide to use any of what I wrote last year--just not turn that part in for the word count. After all, I'm writing this with an eye to eventual publication, so it needs to be about 80-90,000 words, not 50,000.
