After two days in a row of writing 10,000 words, I reached my goal of 35,000 words around eleven tonight. It was the second time I thought I had reached 35,000; my word counter read 35k nearly an hour before that, so I checked with Jannowrimo’s word counter. This is something I should have been doing all along and didn’t think to do until hitting 35,000 words. Oops. Luckily it was early enough that I could write enough to reach the Janno word counter’s version of 35,000 words, so I did exactly that.

I now know how every person who has finished a timed writing challenge at the last minute feels. Even when I finished NaNo on the 30th my first year and when I finished Script Frenzy on the last day every year, I still finished with hours to spare and knew that I probably wouldn’t be writing in the last few minutes. For Janno, that looked possible, not because of my typing speed but because of my inability to create something in time. There’s a certain freedom lost when the first draft is done. I’m not worried about the prose yet, though I’ll stop and make it suck less when I’m thinking about it. The storyline is what I’m concentrating on right now, and making the story and conflict make sense at the basic level is what has taken up most of my time this month. That’s also why I quit for two weeks; I couldn’t think of anything to write until getting jump-started again by a friend.

The interesting part is that I celebrated exactly what I had done on average for all of November, yet this felt much harder. Maybe it’s because I was writing the third draft of this story and not even the entire thing, but the feeling wasn’t as free as the first draft feeling. Time will tell if this is unique to the story or not.

But now we party, and by party I mean sleep.