Sunday, November 28, 2010

Nanowrimo 2010: WINNER!!!

I submitted my word count to Nanowrimo.org and I was rewarded with this image:
Huzzah!  I finished my novel this morning with 50,010 words.  Well, according to Nanowrimo, anyway.  My word counter on Scrivener had about 60 more words, so I'm not really sure what Nanowrimo isn't counting, but who cares?  I won, dammit!

It feels so good to claim victory, especially a little bit early.  I spent about four hours Saturday night and pounded out almost 8,000 words before I gave into the siren call of sleep.  And then this morning, Michael was really sweet and took Billa to the park so that I could finish the last 1,800 words and post my victory.  Not ten seconds after I finished whooping and hollering over my win, my husband and daughter walked in the door and saw me grinning like an idiot.  He knew why I was so happy and we celebrated by purchasing a bottle of wine to enjoy with our dinner and movie for this evening.

I am so relieved to have finished.  I gladly took on the challenge and while I am proud of my accomplishment, I didn't realize how much pressure and stress I was feeling from the challenge!  But like last year, I learned so much about myself and my writing.  As I mentioned previously, I had started with another idea, but nixed it in favor of an older one.  I'm glad I did, because I am looking forward to editing that story soon.  It's total crap right now, but with a little hacking here and there, I think it will be much better.  i also learned a lot about where I need to improve my skills as a writer.  I'm good at dialogue, plotting, and characterization, but I need to do some serious work on describing things and figuring out how to tease the details to keep the reader engaged. 

I'm also relieved because during the course of this year's challenge, I came up with several more novel ideas and now I can actually start them!

Thank you to all of the wonderful people at Nanowrimo for putting together this year's challenge and especially to all my friends and family for encouraging me to keep going.  I want to give a shout out to my friends Victoria and Michelle for joining me in the challenge and helping to keep me on track and moving along.  I hope you two are winners too!

Excitedly yours,
Kelly

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