I am done with NaNoWriMo06.

My friends, I am done.

My novel is completed.

I truncated, I summarized, I left lots of things out, but goddamn it, I nailed the ending, I saved Xavier, and that’s all that matters. It’s about.. the ending… My wordcount is somewhere over 62K, according to gngr’s wordcounter, as I haven’t one of my own. And the website won’t do wordcounts for me anymore. Grrr!

I had a lot of fear doing this final writing stint, so I decided to do the most emotionally-driven scene first. So I started with a fictionalization of when I hit rock bottom. Very quickly, I couldn’t stop crying. I hope it translated into the text I wrote. It was rather nice, I haven’t had a good cry in a long time. Naturally, given that Xavier isn’t me, I changed some things. I simplified some things to all hell, if only people KNEW how complicated things actually were.

Next year, I’m outlining. I’m outlining to all hell. And I’m going to do an aggressive campaign to get some people to compete with me. Laura Margaret was a fun buddy to compete with, though, it would be better if I had more than one person to keep pace with. I don’t have that many people on my list, but I think 62K is more than the average person. My initial estimate was right, 75K. But I had to cut out a lot of scenes that could have been in there to drive up wordcount.

What matters is that it’s done. It is DONE. And do notice the graph. I had many spans where I didn’t touch it at all. Yet I still finished. Cranking out 5K on the first day helped like you wouldn’t believe. Builds confidence.

Next year, I’ll be writing Every RPG Ever Made. I have a 11 months to prepare (read: play lots of video games), and I intend for it to be the silliest, most outrageous thing I’ve ever written. Given that it’s in a video game universe, I can make ANYTHING HAPPEN. Which is perfect for my completely random brain. :: smiles :: I’m thinking of increasing my daily quota to 2.5K, as I tend to average 3K when I do sit down to write. This would give me a total of around 75K. But I don’t intend for it to be all filler. Okay, maybe SOME filler. But quality filler! : D I assume I’ll be writing four to five days a week, maybe three, and annotate what material I’ll be writing each day. Well, maybe. Knowing me, I’ll ignore this completely and start writing on the fly on November 1st, 2007. That is how I wrote most of this, after all. Writing, going to bed, and getting up the next morning wondering, “What the hell am I going to write next?”

Anyway. I have completed my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel. YAY FOR ME!