If you can call it a novel...

 If you can really call my 50,000 words a novel, it is finished. Last night, around 10, I limped across the finish line. That's an entire day early, people. Since I ran out of story about 30,000 words in, I spent a lot time with the "And then they did this..." which was followed by "And then they did this...."
It was a battle. Last night as I was going through the story, hunting for places to put very small scenes that had popped in my head, I felt encouraged because it was getting funnier the longer/later I went into it. Isn't it amazing how that works?

National Novel Writing Month has been fun. The thing is...if I had just stuck with the suggested word count of 1,667 words a day, I would have breezed through this. My graph would have been a nice, even, gradual incline to match the purple line instead of a whole lot of flat blue followed by the heights, "Oh, man, I better get serious about this." And I would have learned a very good habit of sitting down every day to write. Someone asked me if it was easy. I did not laugh hysterically but I thought about it. The sitting down is the hard part. Putting my fingers on the keyboard is a struggle. Stories, I've got a million of 'em (most of them much shorter than 50,000 words unfortunately).

Two things made this possible:
Write or Die online edition. Something about the threat of a baby crying and being Rickrolled (actually, it's only music and does it count if I know it's coming?) was enough to keep me frantically clicking away like nothing else. Of course, it also means I have a collection of 50,000 words like ligk, thoughits, and churk. They mean something but it's going to take an investigation to figure it all out.

Long weekends. I needed the time to rest between bouts.

I might try this again after I have titanium elbow and wrist replacement.

Now I'm on to my next overwhelming task: Christmas.
Do they make a Write or Die version for Christmas shopping? Or housecleaning? Could somebody get on that stat?