I did it.

I actually did it.

I can’t tell you how unbelievably excited I am to say I actually hit 50,000 words at about 4am on Friday night, got it validated on the NaNoWriMo website straight away and immediately started crying with joy. Seriously. I was in tears.

It was actually pretty sad, because I didn’t think I’d actually get emotional about hitting my end-of-month word count (and being able to cross it off the Life List, by the way). But looking back, it’s actually meant a great deal to me to have finished it. And although the novel I wrote is not yet finished (I still have another 30k to write before I reach my final first-draft-target for it), I have 50,020 words more than I did 26 days ago.

If you told me back in March that by the end of the year I’d have written 50k on the same story by the end of the year, I would have probably laughed at you (after I’d gotten over the idea of you being a time traveller, of course) and then sobbed into a ball of frustrated angst. It would have been a very sorry sight. Now I feel like I want to go back to that old self, that self who didn’t trust herself to start anything new, who had far too many experiences to back her up that I was a loser, and say “It’s okay. It get’s better. You turn out awesome in the end, and you don’t even have that far to go.”

And if I ever again dare to doubt my ability to meet a goal, I have a damn certificate to shut me up.

That thing is getting framed and then getting hung on my wall.

Once December is out of the way, I’m going to work on finishing the first draft of the book, and then progressively editing it until I have a version that is decent enough to mail to publishers. That’s the next step in this story. But the very fact that I can close the chapter on this part is enough to keep me going through the rest of it.