I Think I Deserve A Nice Drink After All Of That
There's a thread on nanowrimo.org's "Polling Booth" boards called "Who you gonna call?" and while the primary answer was "Ghostbusters," (to be fair it was one of the choices) I knew what that question meant to me. I realized that I really couldn't call anyone. The only other person who would care whose number is in my cell phone is squirrelgirl22.
But I did provide the following answer to the question:
"I'm not going to call anyone since no one on my phone much cares that I'm doing NaNoWriMo. I will e-mail about five people and post in my LiveJournal the second I finish!"
I am a little bit of a lier but this is the fate's honest truth.
At 9:22 this evening I wrote my 50,000th words - respect.
Who knew that I could also write some poetry in the paragraph that contained my 50,000th word. I do have to admit that I cheated a little. The sentence was originially going to read, "Liam walked across the floor, clean for the day as opposed to its usual sticky consistency at night and took off the cap that he was wearing in a show of deference and respect."
So my 50,000th word was almost "and." I'm sure I wouldn't be the first to have "and," "the," or "said" as the winning word and since I did type out the sentence count "and" as my winning word if you want, but I'm counting "respect" because that's the 50,000th word that was saved going into the first edit. :)
There was one thing that I did immediately after I finished up a couple of extra paragraphs just to make sure I didn't lose too many words (as happened to squirrelgirl22). I posted a message on the Illinois::Chicago regional board in the thread that rosemilk started called "I FINISHED!" which read the following.
"Add me to the list in exactly twice as long as my writing buddy rosemilk. Who knew what would be when we got our picture taken together typing out the challenge to St. Louis? I couldn't have asked for more inspiration than everybody who posted in this forum and the entirety of Illinois::Chicago.
May everyone else join the posters in this forum in the next couple of days!"
And I'm really serious. I doubt if I didn't have the Illinois::Chicago challenge to Missouri::St. Louis going on, I probably wouldn't have finished. There were so many times that I wanted to pack it in this month but I didn't want to let down the other 46 Chicago writers who were my teammates against the hated (sort of) southerners.
The funny thing about that word war though was that me and my own personal St. Louis word challenger reliantfc3 ended up finishing almost the exact same time.
There were only about 45 minutes between the time that she and I reached 50,000 (she hit it at 10:10 p.m.). So while the war is still going on for two more days, I at least crossed the winner's line first.
incendiarymind: 50,213 words
reliantfc3: 50,022 words
She turned out to be the best writing buddy that I've ever had since she would not write for four days and then kick out 5,000 words. I always felt I had to get as far ahead of her as possible to stop her from jumping me when she would next start writing.
Not that I'm stopping at 50,000 (well, technically 50,213) since I don't want to be one of the many who reach 50,000, accomplish the standard goal and call it quits (especially those people who cross it mid-month and stop). The bar is meaningless to me personally if I don't try to use the full month of November to get as close to the real end of my novel as possible.
So tomorrow it's right back at it trying to pull about 3,000 words a night for the final two nights and see if I can't end up on the first 15 pages or so of final word counts (right now I'm on about the 40th). And I can't stop writing when I've got three friends who are still trying to finish. I won't name names of two of them to jinx it, but I do just want to say.
Come on oracleofdoom, you're next! I have faith in you!
Plus there's still one last goal, beating the November word count of last year's novel. Though 16,000 more words in two days is going to be damn near impossible (65,653 was last year's final word count).
2004 NaNoWriMo: 63,190 words
2005 NaNoWriMo: 50,213 words
And in a final note, the complete set of NaNoWriMo victory screen shots are at http://home.ripway.com/2003-8/22463/nanowin/ if anyone wants to see the full winner's process to get more inspiration.
Good luck to all of my friends typing toward the 50,000 word count! Two days is a lot of time!
But I did provide the following answer to the question:
"I'm not going to call anyone since no one on my phone much cares that I'm doing NaNoWriMo. I will e-mail about five people and post in my LiveJournal the second I finish!"
I am a little bit of a lier but this is the fate's honest truth.
At 9:22 this evening I wrote my 50,000th words - respect.
Who knew that I could also write some poetry in the paragraph that contained my 50,000th word. I do have to admit that I cheated a little. The sentence was originially going to read, "Liam walked across the floor, clean for the day as opposed to its usual sticky consistency at night and took off the cap that he was wearing in a show of deference and respect."
|
So my 50,000th word was almost "and." I'm sure I wouldn't be the first to have "and," "the," or "said" as the winning word and since I did type out the sentence count "and" as my winning word if you want, but I'm counting "respect" because that's the 50,000th word that was saved going into the first edit. :)
There was one thing that I did immediately after I finished up a couple of extra paragraphs just to make sure I didn't lose too many words (as happened to squirrelgirl22). I posted a message on the Illinois::Chicago regional board in the thread that rosemilk started called "I FINISHED!" which read the following.
"Add me to the list in exactly twice as long as my writing buddy rosemilk. Who knew what would be when we got our picture taken together typing out the challenge to St. Louis? I couldn't have asked for more inspiration than everybody who posted in this forum and the entirety of Illinois::Chicago.
May everyone else join the posters in this forum in the next couple of days!"
And I'm really serious. I doubt if I didn't have the Illinois::Chicago challenge to Missouri::St. Louis going on, I probably wouldn't have finished. There were so many times that I wanted to pack it in this month but I didn't want to let down the other 46 Chicago writers who were my teammates against the hated (sort of) southerners.
The funny thing about that word war though was that me and my own personal St. Louis word challenger reliantfc3 ended up finishing almost the exact same time.
There were only about 45 minutes between the time that she and I reached 50,000 (she hit it at 10:10 p.m.). So while the war is still going on for two more days, I at least crossed the winner's line first.
incendiarymind: 50,213 words
reliantfc3: 50,022 words
She turned out to be the best writing buddy that I've ever had since she would not write for four days and then kick out 5,000 words. I always felt I had to get as far ahead of her as possible to stop her from jumping me when she would next start writing.
Not that I'm stopping at 50,000 (well, technically 50,213) since I don't want to be one of the many who reach 50,000, accomplish the standard goal and call it quits (especially those people who cross it mid-month and stop). The bar is meaningless to me personally if I don't try to use the full month of November to get as close to the real end of my novel as possible.
So tomorrow it's right back at it trying to pull about 3,000 words a night for the final two nights and see if I can't end up on the first 15 pages or so of final word counts (right now I'm on about the 40th). And I can't stop writing when I've got three friends who are still trying to finish. I won't name names of two of them to jinx it, but I do just want to say.
Come on oracleofdoom, you're next! I have faith in you!
Plus there's still one last goal, beating the November word count of last year's novel. Though 16,000 more words in two days is going to be damn near impossible (65,653 was last year's final word count).
2004 NaNoWriMo: 63,190 words
2005 NaNoWriMo: 50,213 words
And in a final note, the complete set of NaNoWriMo victory screen shots are at http://home.ripway.com/2003-8/22463/nanowin/ if anyone wants to see the full winner's process to get more inspiration.
Good luck to all of my friends typing toward the 50,000 word count! Two days is a lot of time!
posted by incendiarymind at 8:31 PM
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