I have truly amazed me this year. Last year I wrote 76 thousand words in thirty days during NaNoWriMo. However, while the word count was fairly impressive and I was very pleased with that, the novel itself, the story, was not finished at said 76K. It took me another seven months to write just 16 thousand words and wrap the novel up at 92K. I was happy with the entire effort, and pleased that I was able to both meet the challenge of actually writing an honest-to-goodness novel-length story, not to mention the fact that I FINISHED it(!) (and we all know what a big fan I am of finishing things!!!), but it was a lengthy process, one which sucked up my creative writing energies for pretty much every other project that might have possibly come my way.

This year my goal was to not only write the 50 thousand words in 30 days, but to actually complete an entire novel, from “It was a dark and stormy night” to “and they all lived somewhat happily together ever after except when they had to decide who was going to pay for pizza or whose turn it was to take out the trash” by the end of the month.

I am extremely happy to say that, despite starting with nothing more than the idea of “this guy is looking for a job, and he meets this other guy” I slogged and scraped and sprinted my way through the month of November to wind up with an entire rough draft of a novel from first word to last by 9:22pm Eastern Time this evening. I even have an entire day left! Hah!

I am currently basking in the glow of accomplishment, celebrating by listening to some music and drinking a little water (yeah, I live big)…and wondering about The Next Big Challenge: turning this thing into a polished finished draft. Stay tuned, kids. It could get messy…or neater and more coherent, perhaps!

At approximately 6:43 last night I hit the magical fifty thousand word mark for NaNoWriMo. That’s fifty thousand words in twenty-two days which works out to an average of…two thousand, two hundred, seventy-two words (plus point seventy-two repeating) per day. That’s a fun average, considering that the first day I wrote something like five or six hundred words, and there were many days where I only wrote the minimun average, which is 1,667. Obviously, on a few days here and there I exceeded the minimun, as on the 21st, when I wrote eight thousand.

This means that, were I to stop writing now, I would still officially win the challenge. The story is not done, though, so I push on. I’m really hoping to finish this thing by midnight on the 30th. I don’t know how it’s supposed to end, though, so it’s hard to say. This reminds me of a joke I’ve heard among the fantasy and sci-fi crowd being that the way to please a publisher is to write a trilogy, as it ensures sales for three books instead of just one. Personally, I’ll be happy if I’m able to finish writing a single book without having to worry about what might come next. Whether I or anyone else wants to read this after I’m done is an entirely different matter altogether.