NaNo 2008 Day 30: The sweetest feeling
So, I did it. This afternoon at about 1:45pm [1] I crossed the 50,000 threshold, and I didn’t stop smiling for about two hours.
Earlier this week, I’d pretty much given up because there were so many other things clamouring for my time. Monday and Tuesday I didn’t write at all, chosing to focus on my book club books. On Wednesday, I opened the file and read the last few paragraphs and added a few hundred words. I didn’t expect to reach 50,000 since I still didn’t have an ending, but I’d see how far I could go.
During the day Thursday, I added a few hundred words here and there, and it ended up shaking loose a few ideas. That night, I kept at it and got close to forty thousand. Friday night I got the rest of the way there. Saturday morning, while I was walking home from Christmas shopping downtown, I thought about what I really wanted to accomplish – did I really care if I finished? Was it really important to finish, and in the big scheme of things, did it matter if I finished?
The answer was yes. Nothing depended on me finishing it, but I wanted to succeed. And how could I give up so close to the end?
As soon as I got home, I started writing, and over the next two hours added another three thousand words to the story and had an ending in mind. Later that night, I added another two thousand and positioned my characters for the big finish. This morning I got up, added half of what I had left, took a break for a few hours, and then sat down and finished the thing in one go. And there was an ending – a happy one, too. In my fictional universe, it’s entirely possible for two random strangers to meet on a subway, fall for each other, decide that it’s true love after three weeks, and then agree to open a book shop together [2].
Thank you everyone who’s cheered me on, offered encouragement, and asked me how things were going. I wrote this story because I wanted to, but I kept going because I knew you cared. Congrats to my fellow NaNo’ers – Julie, Randal, Rhiannon and Meghan – and to Dave for his successful participation in NaNoBloMo, the blogging equivalent.
[1] I’m not used to writing numbers anymore – I’ve been writing out the whole word for a month now in order to pad my word count.
[2] That’s actually pretty much the plot of my story this year.
Congrats, Rebecca! That’s quite an accomplishment!
umm, thanks for the NaNo shoutout, but, ahhh, I’m not a NaNo’er – silly me, when I wrote on Facebook that I had 500 words left to go, I was, uh, referring to the 2,500-word art history that I was (am still?) desperately trying to write for, uh, December 1 due date. (Which, ahh, would be today. Which, ahh, explains why it’s now WAAAY past my bedtime and I am still sitting up writing on your blog instead of finishing the paper, which is still nearly 500 words too short.) It just happened that my comment occurred on November 30. I could see where the confusion might come in
by the way, congrats!
That’s some crazy resolve you’ve got there. Every time you mentioned one of your huge deficits, I though there’s no way she’s gonna make it. Because I’m a stupid old doubter, apparently. But I was wrong, and you did it, and you are completely awesome.