NaNoWriMo Day 24: Winning and the life of a novel

It’s 0612h in the morning and I’m staring at the lit up monitor.

The cursor pulses like a heart beating, right about the last letter to a month-long verbose of prose and endless plotting. I have an open document, a long document, that I await uploading on the official word counter for NaNoWriMo and much to my excitement, the document meets the official target I’d set for the month. 50K. It’s sort of mindblowing thinking about it, something that feels surreal, maybe to a fault because there was never a point that I felt I needed to completely turn away from this novel.

Recounting the past month is something that I largely consider a really fun lesson, getting to know so much about what I can achieve, the community feel of being around people that share the same focus and zeal and just meeting people. But most of all, I think finding myself through it could be the best lesson I could have learnt.

I started off a bit late, and as a first timer, on the third of this month and I’ve gone through each day thinking about the novel I was writing. I’ve also gotten to meet other wrimos from so many communities including this one on Medium and other writing forums and communities (a shoutout to wattpad), which helped so much throughout the month.

There was even a writing challenge helping with some pep talk and encouragement by Wattpad called #JustWriteIt which gave some tips and support the entire month. I’ve gotten around getting out of the rut of writer’s block this way and boy has it been incredibly helpful.

But I think nothing tells a much more compelling story than the community itself, which is why I’m mostly thankful for this publication on Medium, the staff and people who dedicated a month of their time to read and help people tell their stories through it (jaimeejaimee’s consistent and dare I say inspiring first timer’s journey, The compelling novel prompts and the extremely helpful and informative posts from Kim Purcell, Tom Farr, Julie Russell, Shawn White and many more). Obviously, there’s a lot here and this is just scratching the surface.

Even after all this and after I have this 50K draft waiting for some editing, there’s one thing that stands true. The cursor is still blinking, still pulsing like a heart beating, right about the last letter to a month-long verbose of prose and endless plotting.

To me, it means something. It means this is not the end because there is no end. I like to think of this 50K mark as a checkpoint, maybe a breather that’ll help me kick back to life and continue on with this novel. And as it stands, I like meaning it bears and I can’t wait to start this all over again.

…Next year.

(I’m also considering making a harmless trailer for the novel, just a little something for the fun of it)