NaNo – Day 30 part 2 – and the winner is…

ME!

Congratulations to me and thousands of others who successfully wrote 50,000 words this month.  My prize?  A lovely computer generated certificate and an icon for my website.

I am very happy and very proud of this accomplishment, but I wonder if there is a better word than “winner”.  Do people who finish a marathon call themselves “winner”?  Maybe “finisher” or “victor”.  (Victor means the same as winner but sounds different on the ear and requires clarification whereas “winner” sounds like you beat out other people to get a prize.)  Really, “I won NaNoWriMo” sounds almost identical to “I won Writers of the Future.”  Yes, I have wone both now, but one was a attle against myself and the other was a battle against hundreds (possibly thousands) of other writers.  Both are worthy accomplishments, but one definitely paid better.  Though a workable novel is priceless in itself and could end up worth a lot more money.

Anyway, I finished around 9:00 on the last day of November.  There were only 3 days this month during which I did not write, so I figure I could have finished 3 days earlier if I hadn’t been puking the day after Thanksgiving and just ill equipped to write that one weekend.  Looking at my stats, I’m surprised to see that Mondays were pretty good days for writing.  Mid-week was worse, surely due to work-related distractions.

I am glad I did this.  It shows me that  can write every day, even amid distraction.  I can outline.  I can follow an outline.  I can decide parts of the outline suck but keep writing anyway.  I can turn off the editor long enough to get some work done.  It’s been a long time since I wrote this much on a single project.  On the one novel I did complete, this amount of writing took about 4-6 months.

I need to keep powering through this novel, but there is a project I’d like to turn to briefly, my ever-festering steampunk fairy tale project.  It is so close to being done and really close to being great.  I think it’s time to attack it for a few days before I hit The Realm Crystal again.  I need to finish the draft and I REALLY need to edit.  For instance, I want to turn one of my bad guys into an obnoxious good guy (you know, the one that gets killed in the zombie movies and everyone cheers) who slowly gives in to his nefarious impulses, then gets devoured by the true bad guy.  (It was written as fairly bad guy gets too big for his britches and gets devoured by true bad guy…not quite special enough.)  That’s the biggest change, but there will be many.  But first, get to the last page — still a long trek from where I am.

I hope everyone else found NaNo as rewarding as I did this year.  Keep writing and keep dropping by.