Completion

It’s November the 30^th. I just uploaded the final wordcount on my NaNoWriMo novel. 70,439 words. – Was that really it?

It’s an odd feeling for someone who’s used to … shall we say, write at a more pedestrian pace to manage 70K in 30 days (yes, the official goal is 50K, but I got there a while ago, and the story was nowhere near the conclusion). A month like that, and you really feel that you get somewhere. What was just a sketch or a vague idea or a few pages of notes has turned into a more or less complete story.
It’s the first time in a long time that I have written the conclusion of a story of substantial length, and it is an amazing feeling. And very, very strange. (I will spare you the long-winded analogies about journeys for now.)
I have enjoyed putting on my special NaNoWriMo hat (thinking cap) now and then, I have gotten myself into a few wonderful “word wars” with fellow writers to see who could write a certain number of words fastest, I have had fun including as minor characters who actually star in other writing projects of mine, and the idea that some of my friends and I had to make small notes with “writing prompts” for each others’ stories was great to work with.
I managed to do most of the things I set out to do. I had a day of writing more than 5K, I got to the climax and the conclusion of the tale, and a few other goals that I had set for myself. And thank you, muse(s), for making this project possible.

But no, to answer my initial question, that was not really it at all. Though right now, I have a feeling of near disbelief and need to let it sink in that this year’s NaNoWriMo is over, I have the first draft of a novel that didn’t exist just 30 days ago. It has a beginning and a middle and an ending and more or less all the important scenes. But it needs revision before I show it to anyone. It needs a lot of work. And that’s fine. I think I will leave it to set (do novels set?) for a while, perhaps until January, and then I will read it through and see where to go from there. Actually, I’m quite looking forward to it.
In the meantime, I will be working on other writing projects (such as my part of the annual Christmas calender for the writing group of which I am a member).

To my fellow NaNoWriMoers: I hope you had a great time. If you reached the 50K, congratulations! If you didn’t, don’t worry – you started writing a novel. That’s something most people never do.

For those of you who are into this sort of thing, here is a graph that shows on which days I may have neglected doing the dishes, or maybe on which days I enjoyed several cups of coffee in November 2010.