NaNoWriMo final thoughts

It's December.

NaNoWriMo officially ended at midnight last night, but I finished my novel on Friday, and I crossed the 50,000-word mark Tuesday night (Wednesday morning). It ended at 55,197 words.

Today, I printed it all out. With single-spacing, 10 point font, tiny margins, and no page breaks, it worked out to 40 pages. (Formatted like a paperback, it's about 200 pages.) It's amazing what a thrill you get out of a stack of warm paper, knowing that you wrote all 55 thousand of those words, and in only 28 days.

It's really been a life-changing experience, much more so than I had originally thought it would be, maybe even more than for most other participants. Not to belittle their accomplishments. All 21,683 of them are incredible. And the community is one of the abolute best things in the world, especially on twitter.

But I never really liked writing. I've never been bad at it, but I've always kind of looked at English majors and aspiring writers as over-artsy dreamers. Sure, I admired their dreams, but I never understood the allure of writing, so the idea never made sense to me.

This past month, though, has opened my eyes. I have to say this has been the most fun I've had, like, ever. The thrill of creation. And it's even cheaper than crochet and cross-stitch. Especially near the end, when my plot and my characters started to take over every moment of my thoughts. It took on a life of its own for the last 25,000 words or so. It was a real thrill, and something addicting. NaNoWriMo has become a part of me. I don't think I'll ever get over the writing bug.

Yet I just wrote a bunch of sentence fragments.

'K then. I hope some of my dear readers will consider writing their own month-long novel next November. Check it!

Much love,

-Ganchi

Homesickness

Yeah.

I'm finally getting homesick. I guess I had let my guard down. I wasn't expecting it to happen.

And now it's December and I want to be home.

Don't get me wrong. I'm loving every minute of Europe. So don't feel sorry for me.

Just send me letters! :)

Thanksgiving Skype

I talked to my family tonight over skype!

Remember, you too can skype me! Look me up!

Who am I fooling?

I'm not going to blog about anything worthwhile until December at least.

I've got a backlog of weekend excursions to tell you about, but the only thing I can think about until it's over is NaNoWriMo. So, if you want to hear about that?

I went to my first write-in tonight! Spain is a sparsely populated NaNo region, but there are a few of us in Madrid. Unfortunately, they meet up on Saturdays, which isn't itself a problem, except that I was out of town last week (Salamanca) and will be next as well (Granada) which is especially unfortunate, as it's the last few days of the month. But!

Yesterday I wrote >5000 words, and tonight I wrote >3000, so now I'm at 40,360 - more than two days ahead!

So... write-in. It was at Starbucks on C/ Las Infantas, and it was the first time I've been to Starbucks in Spain (really I don't think I've been in like 6 months, but I'm just as happy with café con leche) Anyway, we were 5 writers, taking up the couches in one corner of the lower level lounge with laptops (see what I did there?) except Excalibor had this spiffy ancient-looking typing machine. So... they were all really nice, and we had a great time racing our word counts in ~hour-long spurts from 5-9 pm. And I got 3,703 words written and crossed the 40,000 word line, which was more than my goal for the day. And I got to witness Excalibor win! That was also very cool.

The only things that would have made it better - mint mochas, and not having the gay guys making out to distract me from my last 300 words. That was awkward and disturbing and I'll stop talking about it.

'K then! Hope you don't mind my absence too much. Why should you? I've been sending postcards every other week or so and I have recieved 2 pieces of mail in almost three months. Seems a tad disproportionate... </rantito>

Hasta luego, un beso,

-Ganchi <3

(short for ganchillo, spanish for crochet, short for crochetgrl, my u/n = it makes sense)

What I've been up to the last few weeks.

Since I last posted on my blog, which I know was quite some time ago, I have in fact been doing some things. In general, weeks are spent at school and I haven't had a free weekend in five weeks.

So, first, a list of where I've been since Alcalá:

• Avila
• Valsaín and Segovia
• Zaragoza
• Fatima

Don't worry. I'll get to each, along with pictures, soon.

Other than that, and what's been taking the majority of my time, is NaNoWriMo. If you've never heard of it, click the link to get more info. But in a nutshell, you write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. If you've been following my twitter feed at all over the last week or so, you'll have noticed that It's been coming along nicely and that I'm really enjoying it. I'm on schedule so far with more 16,845 words! And, yes, I do plan to edit and publish (in some form) my book if I finish it. But for now, there's an excerpt on my NaNo profile page. Click the widget in the sidebar.

That's sort of it for now. Soon I will post about some of my weekend adventures. Until then,

-Rebekah