Victory post, as promised.

See that graph? That's what victory really looks like. That's what difficult, seemingly impossible, absolutely ridiculous tasks look like. I won 4 out of 31 battles, and I still won the war. In 13 days I wrote 171 pages (50,035 words), and if I had had time to write on all 31 days, who knows how long that novel would be. Only four days out of the month did I make the daily goal, and I still got to the 50,000 word milestone.

If you have ever considered writing a novel, please please give me a reasonable excuse why you haven't done so yet. I'm 22. This is my 3rd novel. Why haven't you written one yet?

There were days I didn't want to write, there were days I spent an hour-long commute to and from work, with 12 hours days in between, but I still did it. I moved. I moved all of my things from one side of town to another, then I unpacked, then I spent long, long days at work to make up for the hours I lost. There were days I didn't work, but couldn't write. There were days my boyfriend said "I feel like I haven't seen you. Ignore your novel, come spend time with me" and I did, and I didn't want to leave him, because leaving him meant writing more, and writing more meant more headaches, more exasperated sighs, more junk food to keep my hands from compulsively checking my word count every 50 words. There were days I felt like i wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote....but nothing came of it. It went nowhere.

There were days I wrote scenes of people napping.

There were also days where I wrote one-liners that made me crack up so hard I had to stop writing, but didn't want to. There were days I looked back to a random page and read a sentence, and couldn't stop reading because...it was good, intriguing, really. There were days I couldn't stop thinking about my main character, and would have given anything just to go home and write about her. There were days were i wrote twists and turns even I didn't see coming, and my fingers couldn't keep up with my brain, and my eyes lit up with imagination and intrigue. There were days i couldn't stop talking about my novel, and days where I told Gabe something that happened and he would respond with "That...actually sounds really cool." There were days I wrote thousands and thousands of words, and I was invincible.

And there was the day I hit page 100. There's just something insanely magical about hitting page 100.

Yes, writing a novel in a month is scary, and awful, but it's wonderful and beautiful, and outstanding and above all...you can tell people you wrote a novel.

So what's stopping you? The actual NaNoWriMo event starts 2 months from today...and it's never too early to write down your seemingly 'stupid' idea, and turn it into an amazing outline, and possibly even an amazing book.