I fricken did it!!!!!!
Here are the things I've learned from this experience:
1: Stimuwrite 2 is awesome (no I will never stop singing its praises)
2: Learning to "Yes and" myself. Pregame worldbuilding just doesn't seem to work for me as well as I thought it did. For this nano, I would come up with ideas that I would just throw in for the sake of continuing the story. Normally when I'm writing from a heavily world-built setting, I would have to stop and think: "Wait, does this make sense? Can I do this? What would I have to explain to make this work? Do I have to retcon something now? Rework my world from the ground up?" Instead I would just be like, "Well, now this exists. What else can I do with it?" And I think that's more fun for me.
3: Instead of worldbuilding, I started with a concept I wanted to fulfill. In this case, the premise was a previous set of heroes beating the bad guy by falling to the dark side and giving in to their negative emotions. Thus, they become villains themselves for another generations of heroes to overcome. The emotional core of the story is how you deal with your mistakes and shortcomings not by doubling down, but being open about your weaknesses and striving to do better. Nothing too original about that concept, but it helped me shape the characters and the world. There are still a lot of things that need to be ironed out if I continue the story, but I'm going to start worrying about the bugs during the revision process.
(Just to be transparent, I was writing Animon fanfiction, so I did not by any means build this world from scratch. However, the Animon Story rulesbook is pretty lenient on what sort of lore the GM wants for their game, so there was still a lot of world for me to build.)
4: Keeping up with the habit of writing. When the story stays in my head, it's harder to conceptualize all the happenings and events that need to logistically be there. Even if I don't use most of what I write, the process of writing helps me organize my thoughts better. I'm going to try to write 800 words a day for a while.
5: I still got it, BABYYYYYYY!!!
