It’s been a rough NaNoWriMo. You’ll notice I not only haven’t said two words about it, I never even posted my little widget guy so that you could watch my progress. Even this post should have gone up yesterday but there was baby chaos until late into the night so I never got the chance.

Which is why it will surprise you when I post this…

I won NaNoWriMo yesterday. I wrote over 50,000 words this month. I finished another novel.

And I did it with a teething baby. Who doesn’t nap. As a new parent. While running a company. And being an ML. And on 5 hours or less sleep a night. In only 25 days!

Yes, I am bragging. Don’t you think I deserve a little bragging at this point? Because this was a NaNoWriMo under DURESS and I still killed it. Boom!

I don’t really like the badges this year but I’m going to post a billion of them anyway just because of the principle of the thing.

For someone who is constantly beating up on myself that I could do more and work harder, for a change, I am actually really proud of myself. I honestly didn’t think it was possible for me to do this this year and I did it. I just didn’t allow failure to even be an option, made a ton of sacrifices (mostly sleep and sanity) and sprinted my way to the finish line. (I’m serious about that last part. Every single one of those 50,000 words was written in a 15 minute word sprint because that was all I had time for.)

Now here’s the extra cool part: I passed 50,000 words yesterday. November 25th was the very first day that you could verify as a winner and I got to verify. I almost always finish the 50k early but I have never finished early enough to verify on Day One of verification. Five days early!

What madness is this? The chips were totally stack against me this year and I weirdly ended up having my earliest win ever? And I actually finished the whole (albeit terrible) draft?

I’m excited, is what I’m saying, but I’ll rope it in.

Anyway, while we’re talking about word count, remember when I said that I was going to increase my word count goal for the year to 150,000 since I hit it early? Yeah, I’m considering raising it again because…

141,901 out of 150,000

So, yeah, I don’t know how it’s possible either but I guess by prepping myself for this to be my worst writing year ever, I somehow made it a halfway decent one…? I got nothing. There’s this mad part of me that wants to try to write those last 8,368 words to 150,000 before December just to feel like a badass but I’m going to squash that urge because I think I deserve a break.

How was your writing November?