lj-mood: proud

Done! A little before 4pm this afternoon, I typed the last few words to bring my word count to 50,000. Another 20 minutes and I had the word count up to a number the NaNoWriMo web site interpreted as 50,070. (There’s a strange discrepancy between my own word count and that of the site.)

With NaNoWriMo behind me, and my first novel completed, this is a good time for a random list of Things I’ve Learned In NaNoWriMo.

• Writing an entire novel in a month is easy, provided you get fired just before the month starts.
• I have no idea how I would have written it all if I hadn’t had the month off.
• 1,500 words an hour is a very reasonable speed.
• It was impossible to understand what I was getting myself into before I wrote my first novel.
• With 20-20 hindsight, it’s impossible to understand what kept me from writing it all those years.
• Turning a short story into a novel just because it seems like the theme would make a good novel is really, really hard.
• Writing a novel just because the idea, the plot, and the characters have been running around in my head for eight years is amazingly easy.

Now, as with good pea soup, it’s going to need a period of slow simmering. I’m going to let it rest for a while and write a couple of shorts, before returning to the editing and rewriting.

I did it!