Survival of NaNoWriMo

I did it.  I won.  I am officially a winner.  To date over 10,000 are 2009 NaNoWriMo winners.  For those who don't know - if you finish the contest and write 50,000+ words in one month and call it a novel, you win.

My grand total word count was 50,198.  Every sentence seems to me to be worse than the last.  I never fully fleshed out the lead character or gave him a solid and convincing back story.  My plot was all over the place and from time to time my 'prose' turned into what could be called 'babble'.  But the best part is - I don't care.

I really don't.  As much as I would like to have come out of November with a stunning and polish work of art, I don't care.  I wrote it.  Hell, I finished 18,000 over the past three days and didn't go blind in the process.

This past weekend, I ate a lot of turkey, passed a lot of gas, and wrote a lot.  Oh, and I slept.  I made sure to get lots of naps in.  In fact, one of the first things I did upon finishing my NaNoWriMo project was take a nap.

And it felt good.  Really, really good.

Next year, I will do some fleshing out and outlining prior to sitting down and vomiting up words.  I will try to stay ahead of the game the entire time instead of just the first two day.  I'm sure I will attempt to do quite a lot of things, and one of two of them may actually be completed.

To all other NaNoWriMo 2009 winners - congrats.

NaNoWriMo - Week One

Today is the seventh day of NaNoWriMo 2009 and there have been some hits and misses thus far.  I've just his 10,000 word (1/5 way there) and have finally fleshed out my main character enough to know how he reacts to being abducted and kicked in the ribs.

So I've go that going for me.

In the meantime I'm occasionally keeping track of what's going on in #NaNoWriMo land on twitter.  A small selection of my favorite posts so far:

I think my MC might just have decided he's got a tattoo I didn't know of. #nanowrimo
@lyonza

#nanowrimo excuse no.84: My characters have taken out a restraining order against me.
@namott

I just figured out how to NOT write a sex scene XD #nanowrimo
@darknessdescend

I kind of hate all my characters... #NaNoWriMo
@yabtest

heh. Trying to write while feeling sick leads to some rather, um It-made-sense-at-the-time ideas.
@snazel

1K op een uurtje, ik ben tevreden. Straks verder schrijven #nanowrimo nu "even" eten maken, spaghettisaus voor drie dagen - @lilkim8

Now? I have the ghost of a dead headmistress haunting my MC because they doodled a phallus on her portrait in school #nanowrimo #nanolondon - @jayintheclouds

Back to the grind.  For all you out there looking to hit 15,000 words by Monday - good luck.