So, a picture says a thousand words right? Well take a look at the one over there >>
If you don’t believe that, then go check out this link.
That’s right, my story is finished! Not only did I meet the word count but the actual story is done too 
This was my first NaNo, and what an experience it was! Got a late start, and then just never managed to catch up. Couple times I came close, but never made it. For a while I was in a decent groove, fitting in word wars and bits of writing here and there. Did some covert writing at work hehe, so some of my novel is hand-written pages at the moment.
About half way through one of my characters died. I didn’t kill him, honestly. From the start I knew someone had to die, and I’d planned to kill off a different person. Then I’m in the middle of a one hour word war with my friend Vampire_Rogue and all of a sudden my favorite secondary character is being hauled off. I cried for the rest of the word war 
That was hard, no more writing got done that night. The next evening I wrote the funeral scene, and had the character I was planning to kill say a few words over the unmarked grave.
You can laugh all you want. Those people have lived in my head for over a year, they’re like friends. And then one of them died on my pages…
Oiy, yeah oiy. I’m getting teary thinking about it now. That was the hardest part of the month and I lost the will to live write for a few days. So my already behind self was almost hopelessly behind. Wasn’t impossible though, so you know. Me being me, I just had to get crazy with it. I’d suddenly fallen into plans to go away for the last weekend of the month, and I wanted to enjoy myself.
Enter Mad Dash to Finish – A Night of Writing Dangerously
On Wednesday the 25 my word total was: 35, 238. I was leaving on Friday… so let’s just do some quick math ok?
50,000
-35,238
14,762
That’s Wednesday NIGHT mind you. Thursday is also my busiest day of the week. Ballet with minime in the morning and teaching in the afternoon and family dinner that evening.
So at 9PM on Thursday night I got writing… and writing… and writing…
Determined not to go to sleep until I was finished.
At the start of the evening I could word war and get 900+ words in 15 minutes. I had a personal victory when I wrote 1005 words in a 15 min word war. Then the pain started, first it was a finger cramp, then my back started to ache from sitting, then my wrists started going.
Took a break to do some laundry and just chill. Called a friend for encouragement (it helped!)
The hours passed, the word count grew but my word war ability died. The novel was finished at 4:33AM Friday morning, my last 15 min word war yielded 600 words. Not for lack of thought, but pure inability to actually type. But it was done, and I validated it, posted some “woohoo” tweets and Facebook msgs, and crashed.
~*~*~*~*~*~
The novel is done, some parts are crap, seriously unadulterated crap. For example, I clearly remember a character set in the future yelling “What in tarnation?!” Yeah, I know. But it got the point across for the moment.
Others are moving… funeral scene flashback *sniff*.
And the end? Well.. it’s done, and I love and hate it. It was SO not where I saw the novel going, but then it was like the ball started rolling. And I wasn’t creating the story so much as recording what happened to these characters. Events fell into place, and then, it was over and my response was something along the lines of O.o
Awesome right? Yeah I know.
Now I’m leaving the book to gather a bit of cyber dust. Get some distance, work on other things… in a few months I shall pick it up and begin the LOOOOONG process of editing it into something worth reading.
If you’ve never tried NaNoWriMo you should. Start planning now, create characters, worlds, let them just wander around your brain for the next year and then join the insanity that is November in author-land.
