Well, it’s over for me. I finished National Novel Writing Month this morning with 50,362 words. Whew. And YAY!

Week four was quite the rollercoaster. As I mentioned, I started the week ahead by two days’ worth of word count. I did a little bit of writing on both Tuesday and Wednesday, but because of the holiday and company arriving, I didn’t get in more than 300 words at either session. Which meant I needed to write about 1,000 words on Thursday, or Thanksgiving Day to us in the States.

Do I even need to tell you how much that didn’t happen? I’m not sure any power under the sun could have actually gotten me out of the craziness that was hosting 12 people for Thanksgiving dinner and made me sit at the computer and write. My day in the kitchen started at seven in the morning and wrapped up around five. In between the cooking, there was visiting and eating and watching the most adorable 20 month old dance around our living room. In short, it was an excellent holiday and so I didn’t feel too bad about falling behind on my word count.

But fall behind I did and I spent Friday and Saturday playing catch up with word count. By Friday night I was just ready to be done with the draft and so I buckled down on Saturday morning and again in the evening, determined to finish by the end of the weekend. In all my writing time this month, I think that’s when my internal editor turned off completely. And I mean completely. Not only would I type a sentence that would ordinarily make me cringe and completely ignore it, I pretty much stopped using the delete key all together, which led to some very questionable spelling and punctuation. Ah well, I’m not sure my last scene will survive the revision process, so I’m okay with leaving it as the mess it is.

It’s too soon for me to really reflect on this NaNoWriMo as a whole, so instead I’m going to do a celebratory chair dance  (whoop whoop! raise the roof!) and wish all my fellow NaNoWriMo participants the best of luck in the next three days. I hope you meet the goals you set out to accomplish and I hope you learned something about your writing process along the way.

Cheers!