The math is kind of scary but I think I might have written almost nine-thousand words today. To put things into perspective, that’s NINE THOUSAND words.
Today.
And by, “today” I don’t even mean, “I stayed up to five in the morning freebasing espresso beans, drooling on myself.”
The NaNoWriMo deadling is 11:59pm “Local Time”. Whether that means midnight EST, where I am, or midnight local time in their part of the world (I’m assuming they’re on the West Coast for some reason. Doesn’t it seem like all stuff like this is out on the West Coast?) I don’t know. Fortunately, I was able to get my act together and get it done with time to spare.
Now.
The book itself is not, technically, done. There are as little as 10,000 words and as many as 20-30,000 words remaining to be written. I’m alright with that, though. The goal of National Novel Writing Month is to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I’m just amending that slightly to read, “50,000 words OF a novel in 30 days.”
Semantics, really.
It’s my goal to continue as I have been for the next few weeks, and have the first draft done before Christmas and New Years. Then I will put the book aside for a couple weeks or a month, and revisit it with the intention of cleaning up what I just spent a month writing.
After I got “done”, I did copy/paste a small section of the book — one of my favorite bits, as it happens — under their “Novel Excerpt” section. I don’t think it gives anything away (except, maybe, a character’s name). It’s a cute little section and I’d encourage you to check it out.
Here’s the link to my NaNoWriMo page, one more time for 2007.
Also, here are screenshots of what you see when you “win” National Novel Writing Month:
And here is their chart tracking my progress:
You can click on either of those pictures to see a larger screenshot. I didn’t want to break the page by posting the originals there. I think you can see it for yourself, if you visit my page, but I don’t know for sure.
Thanks, if you came along on this little journey with me. Thanks, also, if you’re one of the many folks who’ve been harassing me to get my ass in gear this month. And to answer the question everyone seems so excited to ask me about, no, you can’t read it. Not yet. But when it’s done, when I’ve gone through the horrible, horrible draft sitting on my desk and fixed all the terribly embarrassing inconsistencies, removed all the dreadfully boring parts, figured out just how to handle plot points that take place before the book somehow at the end of the book without having two chapters of flashbacks . . . when THAT happens, then maybe you can read it.
Oh, and keep harassing me for a couple weeks. I’ll keep the daily word counts coming. Promise.