The Obligatory First December Posting

With all this talk of 'winning' NaNoWriMo,' I personally do not think I made 50,000 words in November, so am I a 'loser'? I don't think so. My only goal was to have a finished novel by the end of November. I'm glad to say that I now am the proud owner of another finished novel. Yes, everyone. I finished it. So, since that was my only goal, I guess I 'won' NaNoWriMo. To be honest, I was sure that I would have finished my novel much sooner than the 28th of November. But really, I don't care. This novel has never had a set deadline for anything. And I love deadlines, mind you. I don't just love the whooshing sound they make when they fly over my head either. I like lists and deadlines and stuff like that. But this novel has never been anything I planned. I would have been happy if it took me to January to finish. It didn't though. I'm very happy with being able to say I finished it.

And a word count, you ask?

107, 352 total words. 

107, 352

107, 352

(?!?!?!!?!?!?)

Yeah, I don't know how I did that nor how my printer is going to print that off next month. No clue whatsoever. My poor printer. I just know it's going to self-destruct to get away from that chore.


Really, it hasn't yet set in that I've finished. I'm still thinking at the end of the day, 'oh, you're got to go write, Sarah.' It's slowly coming though. I'm starting to have all those thoughts that it's going to be terrible, I'm going to hate it, and that I'm going to have to edit/fix absolutely everything in it. This usually comes after the first few days of finishing a novel. It leaves after a week or two, when I start to forget about my novel and un-attach myself emotionally from it. Later, I'll read it and love it and have a 'I'm a genius moment'. That happened a bit today when I read a bit of a chapter only to think, 'this is actually great.' Of course, that's all I'm allowing myself to read for the next month. A writer must fully forget about their novel to ever look at it again correctly.

In the mean time, I'm fully anticipating some severe post-novel blues. I can deal with that. As long as they aren't like Virginia Woolf bad. I've been hoping to reverse this by rewarding myself. Very Pavlov's dog of myself, huh? Rewarding myself by going to a concert seems to have worked though. So... I'll be doing that more often, I guess. Good job, Sarah, turing that oxygen into carbon monoxide. Here's concert tickets. We'll see to what proportions I carry this out.

The next behemoth... editing. Ew.