You no longer have the goals and the deadlines. You no longer have the charts and the progress bars. The forums are still there, and will be 'til they're recycled in October of next year, but they seem less crucial. Unless you made Internet buddies with people, going to the Reference Desk and Plot Doctoring sections no longer means you might be helping a novelling stranger hit 50k.
So, now that my nights are freed from the "tyranny" of my NaNo project, what have I been doing? Well, it's only been 3 days, so not much. Paying attention to blogging and tweeting again. Looking for pertinent articles and blogs to comment on (it's so much harder to comment on writing blogs for me than dog blogs; I'm not sure why). I've got a story or two stewing, but I haven't written anything new yet.
I may revisit a novel that I started awhile back, but only got a chapter or two into. It's to do with werewolves, and yes, actually, I started writing it before Twilight hit the shelves. Now the market is glutted with that sort of material, so maybe I'll work on the post-nuclear-apocalypse book instead. Or maybe I'll finish my First Untitled Steampunk novel.
The sky's the limit, and that's what makes it so hard. Sure, I write every day, but I don't necessarily write fiction every day. Without the NaNoWriMo taskmaster, it's easy to decide that now isn't the right time, or I need to research, or I'd rather play Skryim, or something. Writing is an itch that I don't always need to scratch, but scratch I will. Keeping on after NaNoWriMo is easy and hard; you're in the habit of things, but especially if your project has ended (or if you're sick of looking at it), it's hard to switch gears.
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