For the Win!

Dear lovely people, it has arrived! I have officially written over 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo 2012!!! Unfortunately we cannot validate and get all of our awesome winner regalia until November 25, BUT I am as still an official winner! This is my fifth time doing NaNoWriMo and my fifth time winning! This song feels extremely appropriate right now, and I have been dancing around and singing to it for a while now:

It was all far from easy, let me tell you! There was much "rising up to the challenge of my rivals" this time because I was so lost for a few weeks! I mean, check out this funky graph!

Pretty crazy, right? I am proud to say that I never got behind, but look at how many days I skipped and didn't write anything! There are only a couple of places where I wrote for more than one day in a row. Pretty weird for me. Though, I have to say that this graph also points out something awesome. There were only 12 days that I worked on my story, which means I met the word goal in only 12 days! Wow! Despite the fact that I have won earlier in the month before, that is a new record for me if you just count how many days that it took. That comes out to an average of about 4200 words per day. So cool!

This NaNoWriMo was such a growing experience for me! It was so interesting to write for a younger age group than I am used to and to combine so many other different things, like for most of the time I had basically no girl characters until the end. For a long time I thought there was no way I'd ever try to write for this age group again, but now I think that I probably will. Once I got the story back to a place where I enjoyed writing it, things just rocketed away from there. It was only last Friday that I had the breaking point where I suddenly knew what was going on, and the only days that I did any writing after that was yesterday and today, which gave me a combined number of 17,921 words for the two days. Wow! 

One of my very favorite things about NaNoWriMo is doing the dares that Tavia dishes out each year. This time around I sort of took one of her dares before she even dared us! This dare was to try writing your novel in a different genre for a couple of days. My novel this year started out much like a general juvenile fiction book, and I intended it to become fantasy much sooner than it did. In fact, it fought to not be a fantasy at all, but I dared to change the genre and the result was three furious days of writing that brought me to victory! I am still working on finishing up the story, so maybe when "Tavia's dares part 2" comes out I'll be able to fit one in for real.

I am far from done with this story, let me tell you! Through the Paper Wall has been my hardest piece of work, but also one of my most enjoyable, and I can't wait to finish it up and get on with editing. This one I plan to self publish, so I can get a taste of what that is like.

Whether you have reached that daunting 50K goal yet or not, keep on writing! You never know what will happen or where it will take you!Maybe your mom will randomly show up to congratulate you with a fruit tart when you reach your goal like mine just did, even congratulating me on my ridiculous 10K word run yesterday in an effort to overtake her word count. Thanks Mom! See you in the winners circle!

Happily resting with 50,273 words, 

- Heidi Nicole Bird