No, that would not be machine-gun fire, but the sound of victory you hear.
For today, at about noon, I passed the 80K mark.
That's right, I have completed my goal of pounding out 80,000 words, good or bad, this month. (Mostly bad.)
It's been a long, arduous war filled with at least twenty pots of coffee and probably around 66 hours of typing. The enemy came on strong with everything it could throw at me in November: Thanksgiving, migraines, house guests, sick dogs...
And it's for those reasons that I savor the joys of my victory. It's a powerful feeling to know that you've beaten the demons trying to keep you from your goals. To know that, despite the odds, you can do what you set your mind to.
It's encouraging to know that I can meet goals which seem daunting. To know that when the tough days come along, I don't give up and surrender to my desire to just climb into bed and sleep until December first.
My NaNo novel may not be a polished draft, and it may never be worth publishing. But I do think there are paragraphs that have promise. Maybe there's just one sentence on one page that is a diamond in the rough. And I'll have to wade through three hundred pages just to find it.
I'm okay with that. Because I know that editing is where you really write a book. That's where threads get untangled, character arcs get properly aligned, gaping plot holes are filled, and sentences are polished.
So I'll be moving on soon from writing to editing. And we'll see if I still feel the same about my NaNo 2012 novel when I emerge from my editing foxhole in the spring.
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