The Last of My NaNo Posts (in theory. For this year, at least)

It's a little amazing to me that I want to be writing anything right now, up to and including this blog post. It feels like I've been writing my whole life. Okay, I have been writing my whole life, but what I mean is, it feels like I've been writing without pause for my whole life. Today was especially brutal and I'm still a little spaced from it - as evidenced by the fact that half-way through reading the newsfeed on my Facebook, I was looking for the Save button, in case the computer crashed. But I finished - 50,057 words - and won NaNoWriMo for the first time ever.

As it did with Rhiannon, the word verification thing completely screwed me, deciding that my word count is somewhere in the low 48,000s. I'm more than a little freaked out about this, but in the end, even if I don't get my purple bar, I did what I set out to do: I wrote a novel in 30 days.

We all did, and as predicted, we Kicked November's Ass!

There's a good possibility I shouldn't be writing this right now, as there's a chance that none of it will make any sense, but I want to gloat and share in the gloating with my fellow DevCo NaNo winners.

A few things made this possible. The people who put NaNoWriMo together, for a start. Not that I couldn't have written a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, but more that it's not terribly likely that it would have occurred to me to try. Knowing people were struggling along with me (even if some of you finished impossibly early and were good enough not to rub it in) was another big thing that kept me going. And, of course, telling everyone at work what I was doing, so that I knew I would seem like a total failure if I didn't finish on time. Working the graveyard shift and having a boss that didn't mind that I kept my story saved on the desktop at work, as long as he could read it. Having an amazing guy, when I still had 14,000 words to go on the 28th simply tell me, "You'll do it." All of these things came together, and in the end, produced the rough draft that is eleven eleven wish.

And now I'm going to cut this short. I have seven hours of work left and no sleep to do them on, and am seriously considering ordering myself a hearty meal as a reward for finish NaNo, and I'm starting to think that the fact that I'm even mentioning my dinner plans means that I've lost sight of what is and isn't relevant on a site like this. Yeah, I should definitely go.

Congratulations, everyone :)

Additional 12.02.2010
I put a picture of our amazingness at the top. Hooray for purple bars!