Day #8496 - Finished (Sort of)!

It has taken me quite a while. To get here, I have sacrificed my evenings to slaving over my keyboard and my lunch hours at work to outlining in my steno pad trying to figure out where the heck I am going. But this crazy journey that started on November 1st and seemed like a completely impossible goal has now been accomplished: I have written 50,000 words on a brand new story idea in the last 27 days.

Woot! *insert happy dance here*

I never thought I'd actually be able to take on the beast that is National Novel Writing Month. I mean, it's a ridiculous notion. Who the heck can write an entire novel in a month? It's crazy! It's insane!

It's also not me.

Let me explain. Yes, I did hit the 50,000 word goal that NaNoWriMo sets out for participants, so in that light, I am indeed a winner. But is my story actually done right now? Have I yet typed "the end" and brought the plot to a conclusion? Not so much. So in that regard, I am still a bit of a loser. But still, I'm excited because between work during the day, grad school at night, my two blogs, reading, and the many other things that make up my life, I still think it's pretty cool that I managed to write this much in this amount of time.

So here's to my second story being significantly closer to being done than it was 27 days ago. My hope is to have this first draft completed within the next two weeks, then I will probably take a break from this story and go back to Manuscript #1 (which I really want to come up with a cool code name for) that I wrote this summer and get to editing/rewriting. But I do feel like the pressure is off a bit. While I will still probably write every day, it will be because I want to and I can take my time with it, not because I feel like I have to.

So there you have it, folks. To my fellow WriMos, good luck here in the home stretch. To my fellow writers out there, I wish you luck and success in your own endeavors. What a long and winding road writing a book can take us on as we spend so much time inside our own heads, but what a feeling when you do it, right?

:-)