Winning FTW!

I’ve been over the 50k mark for nanowrimo for some time already – and have had the magic green bar of goodness to boot, but today was the first day where it was possible to validate and win.

I left that process (stubbornly) until the early afternoon when I had finally written the last word of this year’s novel (which was “end” but not as in “The End”) and so had an extra couple of thousand words to go on top of my already robust 77k. While pasting in the final version, I took a few minutes to mess around with making a cover (lame compared to last year’s one) and update the synopsis (which I had just plain forgotten to do). I then sat back and the the nano word-counting robots do their thing and was whisked away to the You Won! page where I got to download my lovely winners certificate and choose from an array of web-badges to adorn this blog with.

My favourite one is below, and I’ll slap one of the standard ones on the Nanowrimo 2008 page.

Despite having broken the 50k barrier some time back, there is still an amazing sense of achievement when your word-count bar goes purple and you get brought to the winners’ page, it makes it seem all that much more real. Last year I hadn’t taken a word-count before validating when I passed the 50k (it was a bit later in the month) and got the fright of my life when everything slowed down before the winners’ page popped. This year I was more than prepared for it, but it still gave me a hefty adrenaline burst, and I sat grinning at my monitor like a fool for a few minutes.

Now I still don’t like this year’s tale all that much, but this is the first year where I managed to both win nanowrimo and complete the first draft in the alotted time-scale, so I’m rather chuffed about it. I may, as I already said, end up scrapping most, if not all of “City on a Hill” as it now exists, but the fact of its existence is pretty nice all the same.

I may squeeze a few more words out by working out the end of last year’s story (past the outline I have) and adding it in, since I’m assured that all the words written this month will count, as long as there is one self-contained story that is over 50k. That may have to wait though, as the lurgy has morphed into an honest-to-goodness flu which meant that after validating today I sloped back to bed with Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” under my arm and read and slept my way through the rest of the day.

So, in short, w00t! I am a winner! Yay, me! (Not something I get to say every day).