All done!
Mon 2003-12-01 17:36:33 (in context)
- 50,011 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 0.00 hrs. revised
OK, I admit it. I am not, thus far, a very good blogger. Given the panic of getting the novel finished, there was no time to blog. But I would be a singularly abyssmal blogger if I did not at least journal the final days of the month and my pulled-out-of-my-backside win. At the very least, I should show off my "Winner!" .jpg, right?
So. Saturday I stayed up all night. Remember how I was going to stay up all night on Samhain and write straight until dawn? Apparently I wasn't serious enough. It takes a real fear of failure for me to get serious and fight the sleepies. That fear didn't really hit until Saturday morning. Even on Friday night I failed to pound out my quota, even with a quota of 7K per day! And Saturday I rather sabotaged, even considering the mixed blessing of a cancelled flying lesson (winds in excess of 28 knots at JeffCo).
I sabotaged it in a really yummy way, though. I went to the Redstone Meadery and tasted pretty much everything they had. That included the 2001 Reserve, best decribed as "the Port of mead." Then I went home and had a mead-induced nap. Word count at the time: 38,000. In trouble? Oh yeah.
So I got back to work around 8:00 and I stayed up all night, averaging about 1,000 words an hour but not necessarily many hours in a row. And I don't do that well. It helped that the rest of the household was up most the night too.
By 7:00 I had the novel up to its major crisis point and the sleepies were really starting to hit, so I went across the street to Vic's for a change of scenery and a bit more caffeine. I asked the barrista, "So what would you recommend for someone who's been up all night and isn't done yet?" He suggested something called a "depth charge." This turned out to be a shot of espresso dumped into a cup of coffee, and it was nasty. A bunch of sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla powder seemed to help. That, and a glass of orange juice, because I try to accompany my drugs with actual food.
I got the climactic penultimate scene written while at the cafe. There came a point where I was crying like a baby while typing it out, and I'm sure the gal at the table next to mine thought I was a basket case. It's usually a good sign that the story, however awkwardly told, is worth telling, so I was starting to get really excited.
I went back home to write the end of the novel. I cried some more. The surviving characters cried some more, and laughed a little too. I wrote the last line, checked my word count, and really started crying.
Barely more than 46,000 words.
Shit!
The rest of the day was spent frantically pulling extra scenes out of, like I said, my backside. And for the last 2K I wasn't even writing story anymore but background material and brainstorming.
But I did finish. And in time to watch Adult Swim, too. So, Yay! Chalk me up another NaNoWriMo win. One more rough draft to go into my compost drawer until such time as I'm ready for a revision... in... I dunno, how about March?