I did it! I wrote a novel!

I finished today, at 50,103 words. I sort of can't believe that I did it, that I finished it. The story was really hard to keep going after 46,000. I had to force out the last few thousand words, but it was challenge and I was up for it. Wow.

Now I have lots of editing and rewriting to do, but I'm looking forward to it. I still haven't seen how many pages it is after I normalize the fonts and sizes-- I worked on three different computers and each had different settings that I couldn't be bothered to change.

Now real life starts again, to some degree. I let all house work, physical activity and laundry go. I wore the same shirt all weekend (and it was a long weekend). I could see my random eccentricities increasing two fold after spending so much intense time in my own head, my imagination.

Can I say this changed me? It did. Hopefully I will get some good sleep tonight and not be running plot lines over and over in my head.

I also want to mention how awesome it was to be charging forward in a pack of people. Marylanders wrote about 35,000,000 words at the time I finished. I can only imagine what the final word count will be for our state. 197 people in MD had already finished this morning. That's an awesome number and an awesome community to feel connected to.

I'm really grateful I did it and that the organization exists.

There were some great pep talks, the best coming from Dave Eggers and Aimee Bender. Eggers used "goddamnit" four times in his post-- surprisingly casual for a mixed audience, but, he did that because he wanted to tell us to just do it, write the thing.

And I did.