I'm a NaNoWriMo Winner!

At last I have finally completed NaNoWriMo! After a difficult second week and an almost non-existent third week I didn't know if I could do it, but in the last week I have really pulled my socks up and I have finally finished! I still cannot believe I have written 50,000 words in just 30 days.
That is the most I ever written for a single fiction project.



I still have a long way to go: the first draft of my novel is not yet complete and even when it is it will take months to edit before I feel that's even good enough to show another human being. But all that doesn't matter right now. The point is, I have actually made a start. After years of saying I was going to start writing a novel, I have finally done it. In its current form my novel may lack crucial scenes, have strange waffling paragraphs of filler and it's plot may not make 100% sense when read in a linear fashion, but I have lots of time to sort all that now. What it does have are some interesting characters, plot twists I never thought I was capable of dreaming up and some nice literary paragraphs filled with imagery that I'm really proud of. I know that I have a long way to go, but I've made a start and I'm very excited about what is to come.

Congratulations to everyone who won NaNoWriMo this year, it's a big achievement. But if you didn't win, for whatever reason, don't feel too bad about yourself. Odds are you wrote a lot more than you thought you would, or would have done if you didn't start NaNoWriMo, and even if you don't finish that novel you probably have some good character, plot and setting ideas that you can use another time. There's always next year.

I'm now heading over to the NaNo website to get myself a winners T shirt, a tote bag and some achievement badges to adorn it with. Yay!

Here are my shameless bragging victory shots: