NaNoWriMo Success

I’ve just successfully validated my third NaNoWriMo novel “win”, with my draft of “Incoherent” which has been written during the 30 days of NaNoWriMo 2012.

At the moment, this first draft is sitting at 50983 words so far. This is, however, perhaps only as much as half way through the novel.

At some point, probably at the stroke of midnight, local time, the wordcount that will forever after be shown for “Incoherent” on the NaNoWriMo site will be frozen, even though there will be many more words written before this novel’s first draft will be finished. What I plan to do for most of the rest of today, November 30th, 2012, is to write more words, in an effort to boost the number immortalized on the NaNoWriMo site.

NaNoWriMo “winner” goodies

The first thing is a cute little “congratulations” video. It did its job and put a smile on my face. 🙂

There is the winner’s badge that we get to post on our blogs and websites. I’ll do all that blog maintenance in December

There is also a framable “winner” certificate, but it’s locked in PDF format. I’ve been unable to print previous versions in colour because NaNoWriMo employs the proprietary Adobe pdfs, which would not print in colour in the free software pdf reader I was using. Of course, that may have changed; I’ll let you know later.

There is also a big list of sponsors who offer gifts. The winner giftie that made my eyes light up was the 5 free Create Space volumes. That will probably take care of the hard copies I’ll need for my The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe Beta Readers. Other than the requirement to use Flash fior uploading novel drafts, I have been very pleased with Create Space.

Later down the list is an offer from 48HourBooks.com to Print 100 books and receive 25 free. I’ve not dealt with them, yet, but it certainly sounds like something to check out.

Most of the prizes look to be discounts on software for writers. This does not particularly interest me because in the past most, if not all of these software deals were for software that was only good for MAC and Windows, making it totally useless for gnu/linux free software users like me. I don’t yet know if this is still the case, the jury is still out on this at the moment.

Anyway, I’m patting myself on the back for having made it through another NaNoWriMo. One of the things I like about NaNoWrimo is that it provides the framework of community.

Special Mentions

My brother Larry Russwurm gave it his first shot this year. He wasn’t confident about being able to write so much every day. Yet he got off to a great start and persisted all month long, handily crossing the finish line a few days ago, far and away ahead of me. Good job! 🙂

Another first timer friend of mine, who made good on his debut commitment to NaNoWriMo, is my friend Gordon Sinclair, Across the pond in Scotland, Gordon embarked on an ambitious joint project and made it through with time to spare. Excellent showing! 😉

I’d also like to say “great job!” to all of my community of writing buddies, both virtual and otherwise. Everyone has lives and commitments, which can make the daily commitment necessary to complete something like NaNoWriMo impracticable. And of course, the unexpected can always throw a monkey wrench in the best laid plans. 😮

Whether you managed to “win” this year or not, just by virtue of participating — even if all you managed was a single sentence — you’re still a winner in my books! 😀

Meantime, I’m off to see if I can wring out a few more words during November…