The Big Five-Oh

Yesterday afternoon I forced myself to finish off surpassing the National Novel Writing Month goal of completing 50,000 words -- I actually ended for the day at 50,003. I'd feel more excitement about it if that meant that the book was going to be done, but there's still some clean-up to do before I'm ready to say I have a complete draft. I think I mentioned here once before that I don't write chronologically. The best analogy I can think of to explain where I am right now is this: Imagine you had just spent a lot of very focused time trying to complete an enormous and detailed jigsaw puzzle by a deadline. And you got all of the pieces together, but only then realized that the puzzle was a little bigger than it said it would be on a box, and for some reason the pieces that you need to finish it have been scattered throughout the room, and you have to go look for them before you can put them all together. Does that make sense?

I don't feel any more pressure. I've reached the goal, and as soon as I can get my word count verified I'll be able to upload my scrambled manuscript and will be awarded with my downloadable PDF certificate. Yay. But I'd still really like to get the rest of what I have to do knocked off in a month. But since I only have school on two of the next seven days, I think I'll have the time I need. It's kind of superficial, but my self-imposed goal at this point in the game is to have this finished so someone will eventually read it and say something like "You wrote THIS? In a MONTH?!"

It won't be an easy read. There's a little darkness in there, some pretty raw emotion, and it will make some people uncomfortable. Not because they'll recognize themselves because even if I did begin some characters with specific people in mind as models, the characters evolved along the way, and I think some became the most fully-realized characters I've ever come up with. Not that this is saying a whole bunch. But still. I'm happy with how it's turned out. Or how I know it will turn out by the time I'm done.