NaNo day 30: and there was much rejoicing!

I finished the darn thing!

Ahem. That is to say, I got 94,380 words for NaNo this year. Not the 100k I was aiming for. Certainly not the 150k I was dreaming about. But I got something much cooler than wordcount, which was the spectacularly glowy feeling of typing END at the bottom of my manuscript. Danica, queen of procrastination, of starting new novels instead of finding middles and ends, and ooh look a squirrel, has now finished two novels!


I'm not even thinking about how much rewriting it will need right now. I'm just so damn excited that I actually finally won a NaNo for real! In the past my lofty wordcounts have always been tainted with the secret shame of never having actually finished any of my novels. I'd stop in that last 1/3, and after November I'd keep procrastinating it, putting it off, trying to rewrite from the beginning again instead of finishing. And I never got anywhere.

Then I pushed myself during a writing retreat last July to actually finish last year's NaNo.  And I did it.  And like Brandon Sanderson said in his NaNo pep talk, the sheer act of finishing, of being able to look back on the entire story as a whole, taught me more about plot construction and story arc than anything else ever had.

I think knowing that I could do it was one of my largest motivating factors. It was the same with my first NaNo. I hit 50k five days early, and then only wrote 3k in those last five days. The sheer fact that I'd managed it was enough for me, even if I hadn't finished the project. The next two years, I blew that wordcount out of the water, and had started to feel pretty damn amazing (read: cocky). What is this 50k, lesser mortals? Why, this year, I'll do triple that!

But then I started to realize something. Others may have only written 50k, or 40k, or 25k, but they were actually finishing. Writing a beginning, a middle, and an end. That, and rereading No Plot? No Problem! helped me to realize the true accomplishment that could be found in NaNo. I'd only written THE END on a novel-length fiction once. But that one taste got me addicted. I wanted more. I wanted more than a number as the marker of my struggles--I wanted an ending!

So anyway, much rambling aside, that's what I'm so excited about right now. This year, for the first time, I have more than just wordcount to celebrate. And celebrate I shall! For as I type this inane mess, Skyrim is downloading on my desktop. Now to just remember I do have classes in the morning, and two manuscripts to critique before writers' group tomorrow--wait, this sounds like real life! That exists after November? Strange concept.

It might be a bit painful tomorrow to wake up and find it all over. But right now, I think I welcome real life. As amazing as NaNo has proven to be for me each year, I could really use a break from writing right now. And from my characters. Yes, I mean you, Cain! You and your whining!

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Listening to: Triumph!! Sheer triumph!

Oh, and I thought I'd stick a few songs up here that stuck out to me as I had my playlist on random as fitting well with parts of my story. They are: Summer Shudder by AFI, The Hunger by Fireflight, and Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow) by Coheed and Cambria. A bit of a strange selection, but that certainly fits my novel! :D