NaNoWriMo Winner!

I won NaNoWriMo!

Are you sick of hearing about it yet? No? Good because I'm not done talking about it. For the last 30 days, I spent hours typing away on my MacBook to hit 50,000 words in a novel. I have been fairly on track throughout the month but learned that I did best when I'd take a day or two off from writing, and then write 3-5k words in a sitting to catch up. I had an idea in my head when I started, but had no clear map of how the story was going to go. I had moments where I didn't know where the story was heading next, and then my fingers would just start typing the next time I sat down. 

My novel is titled Proposing the Truth, and my description of the book is A college senior runs a business helping dudes plan proposals while she dates losers and chronicles the dating foibles throughout. 

There were times it was really fun to write, and times I was just o-v-e-r it. I had a mild panic moment Sunday morning when I was less than a thousand words from hitting the 50k goal and decided to validate my word count on the nanowrimo website. Imagine my surprise when the word count showed I had 800 words LESS than I thought I did. I did some searching on the forums and learned that Open Office, which I had used to write my novel, had some word count glitch having to do with the quotations used, and had been skewing my word count all month. GAH.

I had a mild temper tantrum and then just pushed on. I finished writing the story I had planned, and checked my word count. With the glitch: 50,008. According to the validation, I was still ~800 words off so I added an additional chapter/scene that made up the difference. When I was done with this, I was at 50,101 words and was officially done!

I don't know if I'll ever let anyone read this book. It certainly needs some editing. It's funny and fun, and has some serious moments. It's definitely the type of book I like to read, but it's not the type of book I'd recommend to everyone because it's just so OMG good. So we'll see. 

But in the meantime, I'm going to bask in the awesomeness that is finishing my first novel!