NaNo DONE!!!

After 28 days of concentrated (and often mindless) plot and character development, backdrop creation, describing images and trying to tie everything together by the November 30th deadline, I finally came to the end of my creation called the 50,000 word novel. Whew!

There were days that were exciting when the story seemed to write itself, while others were painful while plodding through what I call 'filler' dialog that moves the plot from one exciting point to the next one. I oftentimes fell asleep at night trying to mentally work out which character was going to do what to whom and why. I found a difficult thing was to keep track of everything going on in the story and had to resort to an outline book that I could carry in my purse to jot down ideas, character names and record story items that I would forget 50 pages later. No matter, because I was able to force myself to keep working toward this insurmountable goal.

During the last few paragraphs, I constantly clicked 'word count' and stressed over tying the story, characters and images into what I had envisioned I could. I sprinted out the last bit of it ending two days early and earning the ability to rejoin my family back in the non-fictional world. It will probably take at least a week (in combination with an Ibuprofen-based product) to work out all the kinks in my neck and hands from all the intent typing I spent on my laptop. But I emerged victorious, and had a very unedited throw-together 50,000 word novel to show for a crazy month of literary exploration. Final word count: 50,930; total number of pages: 180.

At this point I'm not making any commitments for writing NaNo next year, but who knows. It was a fun challenge and I feel good about finishing. Now time to start the Christmas shopping :)