epic fail on the horizon

So I entered into National Novel Writing Month on Nov. 1, which I had early described as the craziest and most ridiculous idea I've had in a while. Now here I am... it's Nov. 29. I officially have just over one day left and, well, I'm not going to make it.

That's correct. I have epically failed to amass the 50K words necessary to don the NaNoWriMo crown. Granted, lots (thousands, even!) never manage to get there either. I could go into a bunch of excuses as to why I will be short (about 15K short, in fact), and it would probably include things like family emergencies, a new promotion at work, friends coming to town, the premiere of the movie New Moon, and my short hiatus trip to Florida.... but I'm not going to do that. Truth be told, I could have made it if I'd stuck with it. I checked out my progress graph, and basically I was completely on track through Nov. 15. I was only about 2,000 words short of where I was supposed to be according to my 1,667 words/day goal. But then I essentially didn't touch the story for a week. A good, solid week of nothing. Then the following week I wrote probably 3 out of the 7 days to finally get past the halfway point.

So I've decided that I signed up for this stupid contest for a reason... and that even though I might not be done YET, I'm close enough now that I can taste it and will be pushing through December on my own. I will get to that 50K goal before Christmas if it kills me. And then if there's still more to say, I'll keep going.

So maybe I am a winner of this contest. After all, the point of the whole thing is simply to get people writing... so pick up those slovenly waste of space people who dream about writing novels but never do it. I was one of those people, and I somehow managed to pull myself out of it. It feels great, so why stop?

QED, I'm a loser with a winner's heart. This project will get finished by the New Year, and I have NaNoWriMo to thank. I'll definitely be participating in this little contest again next year. With a year under my belt, I think I'll do even better next time. I'll know which non-writing behaviors to avoid, I'll take my laptop out of my home at least once a day if I'm feeling stubborn, and I won't allow myself cookies and cake until AFTER the word count of the day has been reached.

But for now... time to add a few more thousand to my current total. It looks like I'll land at just under 40K. That estimates to roughly 120 pages of a book. Not too bad at all, methinks.