SO ... NANOWRIMO, EH?

I think this is the last year I pretend to take part in this activity. It's just not a writing style I'm cut out for. The biggest problem that I have is that maybe I'm not so much a writer as I am an editor. I've often wondered if this is the case. It's not unusual for me to be reading a book and think to myself, "I would have written that sentence like this ..." or "That's not a very good description" of something. I can take other people's words and create something better than the original. But being the original? That's a lot harder than it was in my college creative writing courses. You see, I've been working on the same book since 2008. If you count the number of words I've written, deleted, and re-written in the last four years, I'm probably well over 200,000 words. But I can't help myself - every year I start editing and re-writing from the beginning. Most of the time it's not too terrible, but tonight I found a part that was quite possibly the worst rubbish that I'd ever written. I have no idea what happened to my brain in that chapter. I think it was on vacation. I had to basically re-write the whole thing. Come to think of it, that's basically what I'm doing anyway. I'm going through my story, chapter by chapter, re-writing all the crap, beefing up plot points, building out dialogue, finding holes and filling them in. Right now I'm at the end of chapter 8 and I've got just over 15,000 words. I no longer know how this story ends. Heck, I don't even know what route I need to take to get there. I think the finished product will be far different than what I set out to write back in 2008. If it's better, I have no clue. I'd like to think so ... after all, I am a better editor.