Nine times? Nine times!

Guys.

I am announcing right now that this will probably be the penultimate novel marathon I do. Who knows how I will feel next year, but this year was pretty rough. 

If you look at this handy graph that the lovely NaNoWriMo people provide:

This was really more of a write a novel in about eight days (for the record, on day 23, I was at 6,000-ish words). Once again, it felt absolutely crazy, but completely normal to hammer out 10,000 words in a day. 

I found myself writing best on the train before and after work, any time that might be spent playing on facebook was spent writing novel in the past week. I turned facebook, and pinterest, and gmail off on my computer so that I could focus. I wrote instead of going out to have fun with out of town guests, I wrote instead of getting any of the fun things done I wanted to get done. I wrote when all I wanted to do was go to sleep. And then, I was finished. 

This year was hindered by the fact that I had no idea what I was going to write about for a long time. And then I decided what I was going to write about, and I realized very quickly that it was going to go nowhere. So instead I just changed, about four thousand words in, to make my book about something else. Then there was the fact that there was always something better to do. Something that needed to be done sooner, or something that was more interesting or something that stressed me out more. It was not until last weekend that I realized that Thanksgiving was not the second to the last weekend, but the LAST weekend of November and it was time to hustle. So I hustled. And now it is done.

Next year is ten years. That feels like a good stopping point. Ten years of unreadable novels feels like a good amount. They're stretched over three laptops (one of which does not exist any more, which may mean those novels are gone for good, quelle domage) and ten most different years of my life. Ten years ago was 2004, which was New York, and college, and whirlwind of having absolutely no idea what was going on in my life or anything else. This year's novel is kind of a tribute to that feeling and that year which feels quite appropriate for the second to last one.

Thanks go out to:

Dbudz for always believing in me, even when sometimes he was all, "you do not have to do this you know? You can just stop." But then when I said no, he was all, "okay, I will go make some tea."

Dbudz's family for also being fine with my Thanksgiving being spent on the computer for hours and hours at a time. Also, sorry I am not sorry for smoking all of you in Apples to Apples.

T-bone and her family for not batting an eye when I said, "yeah, I am not going out to dinner/a show/fun things with you, I have to sit at home and write my novel." T-bone does lose a point in the thanks column for introducing me to Scandal, which ate up an entire weekend of writing because sadly, I could not figure out a way to incorporate text messages consisting of "Ohmaaahgaaaah, what just happened, I am about to die." into my novel. It's okay T, I still got it done and Scandal is my most favorite. So its all just fine.

Happy December everyone.