Why is Sam smiling so gleefully while looking completely exhausted at 11:30p.m. on a Tuesday night (November 27th) and giving a thumbs up sign? Isn't it obvious from my face???

At the risk of sounding like I'm crowing (Okay, so I am!): I freakin won NaNoWriMo again! :D After a long, long day on the 27th, I hit what I thought was the 50,000 word mark. I punched my story into the NaNoWriMo website counter and discovered that they didn't consider 2,000 of my words to actually be words like OpenOffice had. It was 9:30p.m. And I being the stubborn gal that I am, said, "What the hell. I'm just gonna finish." So I did. 11:30p.m. I was giving my iphone a thumbs up sign and then fell into bed, dead but victorious. 3 days early too. And let me tell you: it is absolutely crazy to try to write a 50,000 word novel WHILE going to school full-time and working part-time. Crazy. I have no idea why I thought it would be fun. Half the time, I wasn't particularly enjoying writing...I did it out of sheer stubbornness, because my pride would not allow me to admit defeat and give up. When I start something, I hate to be seen as a failure, so I have to finish it. It's a curse and a blessing. NaNo has shown me just how I am such a perfectionist. I can't give up even when it really doesn't matter if I do. Not appearing as a failure is way too important to me. And it was obvious through my stubbornness. On the other hand, I am proud to say that I did NOT let my perfectionist side win the upper hand in the writing process. Instead of stopping constantly to edit and perfect the storyline, I forced myself to just write. And yes, while the story is complete and utter crap, at least I can admit that and not feel ashamed or like a failure. It is crap! The plot has way too many holes, there are far too many characters...to the point of being confusing...and it has a weird ending (Seriously? She goes insane??? Whaaa??) but I'm proud of it being so crappy. Because it means I allowed it to remain that way. It's not a big deal and I didn't stress about it. I'm the perfectionist who finally can say I'm okay with something that's not perfect.

And that feels good.