The End (at least for now)

Yesterday I had my best ever NaNoWriMo writing day. I started off quite well, getting about 2,500 words done before taking a break. However, it wasn't all going to be plain sailing. I was meant to be going to my parents for dinner, but shortly before I left I got a call saying that they had to call an ambulance for my dad (he hasn't been well recently - I won't dwell on the details here). And so I went along to the hospital with them whilst he got checked out (and he was still joking around like he normally does). Once it became clear that they were going to keep him in overnight I came back home, much later than I would have done if he hadn't had to go to hospital. (He's been let out today, so hopefully all should be well there).

I then continued to write my novel, going on late into the night. I was still writing the same chapter that I had been writing over the past few days, as it had now turned into a behemoth of a chapter! But I really enjoyed writing it, and it's one of my favourite parts of the novel so far. I was able to finish the chapter late last night, having written a total of 5,633 words yesterday, which gave me a total of 78,177 words. And that just left another 1,823 words to write to hit my 80k target. (Incidentally, the length of that chapter came to a whopping 9,606 words! I may be able to cut it down a little when I come to rewrite it, but even then it's going to be huge!)

And so today I quickly wrote the final words that I needed to hit my target. A lot of them do ramble on a bit whilst I drag the word score up, but this is NaNoWriMo and so that doesn't matter. I wrote a further 2,027 words today, giving me a final score of 80,204 words, comfortably achieving my target. Yay me!

That said, whenever I cut and paste my novel into the validator on the NaNoWriMo website, it counts the words differently to how my word processor does, and it adds about another 200 onto my total, and so my official, validated score is 80,416 words. However, whichever one is correct, I can say that I wrote 80,000 words of a novel in just one month!

My novel is far from finished though and I still have a lot of plot points to get through, but I'm going to take a break from it for a little while. However, I will go back and finish it, as I really want to get to the end of this novel eventually.

And so let's take a final look at the graph:

I'll be doing a post-mortem on my NaNoWriMo 2008 next week, and so look out for that. But for now I'm going to take a well earned rest!