NOVEMBERZOVER

I just submitted my final word count to the NaNoWriMo site. At 40,041 words, I squeaked in juuuuust this side of...10,000 words short of winning. Partly this is due to two major periods of slacking off during the course of the month, but it's (honestly!) more due to the fact that the story I was writing just wound itself up and finished right at the 40,000 word mark. If I had gotten to this point on the 24th, when I would have if I had kept to schedule, I honestly wouldn't have known what to do for the remainder of the month. The story is just done, and no amount of aiming for 50,000 words would have changed that.

And goofy as it sounds, I feel like I won. I accomplished a hell of a lot more than I expected to. At the beginning of the month I honestly expected myself to give up by the one-week point. Instead, I never gave up, even at my laziest, even as I fell dramatically, irreparably behind. I kept trying. And I succeeded: I finished what is now by far the longest work of fiction I have ever written. And while it's awful in a lot of ways, I think there's stuff worth salvaging in there. I surprised myself especially today and yesterday with the beauty of the imagery I was coming up with (it also quite frankly surprised me when I realized that the novel was going to end on a fairly hopeful note; I didn't think I had that in me).

So: I'm goddamn proud of myself. Thanks, NaNoWriMo, for forcing me to do all this. I don't know where I'm going next, but hopefully I can keep up the writing habit. Probably not as intensively as in November, but to some degree.

As for bloggy pursuits, I do have a blogject I want to get started on, and even aside from that I'll probably be popping in here a bit more frequently than I have been to make all those witty observations that keep you coming back for more. Ha ha! Just kidding! If you could see my google analytics page, you'd know that you quite literally do not exist! Anyway, that's all. Carry on.