NaNoWriMo 2009: And Now The Victory Is Official

On November 14, 2009, I wrote my 50,000th word for NaNoWriMo. On November 21, I finished the first draft of Dirty Pop, and my first complete first draft ever. November 25 is the first day of validation (okay, validation's a little bit early in my timezone for some reason), so I followed the instructions and pasted the text of my novel into the text box so the word-counting bot could count the words. It counted 67,029 words, so at last the green bar I earned during my long 11,000-word Friday the 13th session turned purple. So the NaNoWriMo victory I earned at the end of week 2 is now official. I've won NaNo! But, interestingly enough, my three-year streak of come-from-behind victories has now been shattered.

In my previous three NaNoWriMos, during which I wrote (the three incomplete and fragmentary manuscripts of) the Dictel trilogy (Bad Company, Black Science, and New Flesh), I found myself procrastinating enough that I was way behind in the final week, the result being the now famous Panic Time. Also, each of the Dictel trilogy novels is much longer than 50,000 words, and any one of them may end up 200,000 words long if the plot demands it. Besides, they're political thrillers which require a lot of research.

Dirty Pop and its sequel, Bigger Better Faster More!, on the other hand, are short novels, not much longer than 50,000 words, partly inspired by some of those Japanese "light novels", especially those obsessed with pop culture. These are pop culture novels, with much lighter subjects than the political horror of the Dictel trilogy and Spanner, though the struggles in them remain every bit as intense. Also, they deal with rock 'n' roll, which makes it go down that much easier for me, the frustrated would-be rocker. These are the two reasons why I could find myself inspired to win NaNoWriMo at the end of week one and complete my first novel at the end of week two. I couldn't have done it like this with those three much heavier novels I started writing the three previous years I did NaNo (but still haven't finished yet). And that's why I won early, for the very first in my entire WriMo career, and why I could actually finish a first draft.

I can't rest on my laurels, though. I can still keep writing until NaNoWriMo ends at midnight on the 30th. I still have to edit Dirty Pop if I want to post it online for everyone to read. And for NaNoFiMo next month, I intend to finish my second first draft ever, and the novel I intend to finish is Bad Company.

And so it continues...

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