Sick and sleepless: it’s not all bad

 

Because in one of my wakeful times during the wee hours this morning I was able to go to the NaNoWriMo site and using the validator function that was activated as of midnight, get my winner status made official. 

Well, actually, except for that, sick and sleepless is pretty bad.

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Winner

Just passed the 50,000 word count for my NaNo Novel. This has been a 12,600 word count day. I am pooped and my throat is still sore, but I am a winner. A NaNoWriMo winner.

A week early no less.

Thanks to all of you for all the moral support. It has meant a lot to me.

Oh, about the novel? It’s a first draft, it’s a lot of dreck and I will probably write a few thousand more words this week to wrap up the story a little better than I did tonight. But all that is beside the point, which was to write 50,000 pages of a first draft novel starting November 1, and ending no later than midnight November 30.

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Milestone

Forty thousand words.

Just now I paused in my work on my NaNo Novel to note that I’ve passed the 40K mark in the word count.

I have felt like cr*p since about bedtime on Friday and didn’t write at all yesterday although I’d planned a couple of serious writing sessions, one here at home and the other at the weekly write-in group at the Highlands Ranch Tattered Cover store. I’d not even worried about not writing Friday as I was running around taking care of things in advance of yesterday.

So instead? I slept very little Friday night, by yesterday morning had sore throat and other ugly symptoms. 

Thank goodness for Mucinex, antihistamines, hot coffee, chocolate treats, hot tea, Advil, my warm puppy, my comfy new supportive Travel Sox, snuggly Hanes sweatshirts, and all the other things that have supported me through the last 24 hours. I still feel crummy but I’ve been sitting here writing for 45 minutes and am determined to keep at it all day long. Not one long session but a series of them, broken up by such mundane daily things as showering, doing laundry, walking the dog, and eating.

But I just passed the Forty Thousand Word mark. With a goal of writing Fifty Thousand by midnight on November 30.

Dayum. I just might DO this, huh?

UPDATE: I finally quit writing about 2:30 p.m. with a total word count of 47,854. After dinner? Maybe I’ll just polish this puppy off by passing 50,000 words. The story won’t be all wrapped up neatly but honestly, this NaNoWriMo thing isn’t about that, at least not to me, this time.

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Seventy-five percent

It’s not over till the NaNoWriMo word count validator says I have written 50,000 words, or midnight on November 30, whichever comes first.

But I’m pleased to note that my current word count is 37,644. Which is 75.2% of 50,000.

My first draft novel is a mish-mash of dreck with a few decent scenes, and not something I really want to discuss in detail. Not right now. Maybe not ever. But I will say that the word output speeded up yesterday when I killed off a main character in a random street crime. In a medium sized midwestern US city in 1939, which I learned while writing it has more shock value than, say, such a random crime on the streets of almost any American city in 2008.

Hmm, is that the finish line I can see out there in the distance?

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Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab

Thanks to a post on the forum at the Official NaNoWriMo site, I discovered “Write or Die” at Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab.

W-or-D is an ingenious – and maybe devious – little web application that just may help you blast through a writer’s block.

It works like this. You choose your time goal, your word goal and the mode: Gentle, Normal, Kamikaze or Electric Shock. Then you hit “start” and get a screen with big empty white space to write in, and a countdown timer and a word counter at the bottom. I didn’t set a challenging goal, just 100 words and 10 minutes. Got another 100 words or so plopped down, then cut and pasted it into my NaNo Novel. After writing yesterday and last night, and that little bit this morning, my new word count: 8,548.

Dr. Wicked, you devious genius, you ROCK.

And, Suzanne, Darla, Brenda, M. H. Pixie, Miss Kitty and all the others in my cheering section: you do too. Thank you so much!

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