I now have a feather to put in my cap and a web badge to put on my site. NaNoWriMo is over (well, it’s officially over Sunday night, but I pushed myself to be finished by Thanksgiving), and I have a novel under my belt! Of course, I’d like to double its length (it’s only about 175 pages at this point), but I can take my time with that.

Writing under the gun like that is not entirely new to me; it’s just been a while. I worked three jobs while in college, and, as an English major, I wrote my fair share of papers at 4 AM. What was new about doing NaNoWriMo was that I didn’t go back and edit a single thing. I didn’t read over anything I had written. I just churned out words and forged ahead. I felt like it wasn’t fair – I labored over all of these words (often up to 2700 a night), and I just forced myself to click save and continue. I didn’t get to enjoy them, savor them, rearrange them until they were perfect. I’m not used to writing fiction that way – so unattached. It was difficult at first, but I realized that it was the only way to get all the words down in the time that I had.

Now that it’s over, I’m looking forward to the following:

• Catching up with Nigel and Aidan, who are glad to have their mom back
• Cleaning my house (the end result more than the actual cleaning, of course)
• Reading whatever it is that I wrote! I wrote so fast that I can’t remember!