Now I Know How Sally Field Felt

I'm a winner! I'm a winner!

I'm picturing Sally Field's famous "You like me! You really like me!" line from her Academy Award acceptance speech as I write those words except, well, I'm an unknown male writer and not a world-famous female actress. Plus I didn't really compete against anyone except myself, which is a lot different than winning the votes of influential people in your profession, like Ms Field did.

Now that I think about it, there's really no comparison at all. Forget these first three paragraphs.

But I am happy to report I won NaNoWriMo 2009, by completing 50,000 words of a novel in the thirty days of November. Now the novel is not finished - if it's anything like my first three manuscripts it will end up somewhere around 85,000 to 90,000 words - and it's only a very rough first draft, but it's there and it's taking shape!

The actual, official number of words completed in November was 51,497 and when I look at that total it still amazes me, even though this is the third time I've managed to win the National Novel Writing Month competition. That's a lot of freaking words and even if only half of them make sense, that's pretty incredible. I mean, I can fix the other half on my rewrites and edits, right?

Hopefully it's not a situation where every other word is the one that makes sense, but I wouldn't be too shocked if that were the case.

Anyway, I'm going to celebrate my big victory by watching Monday Night Football in a few minutes, which is probably pretty much how Sally Field celebrated when she won her Oscar. Oh, and if I was supposed to do something this last month and it slipped through the cracks - okay, if I blew you off - please accept my heartfelt apology. I'll try to do better going forward.

Although I do still have a book to finish, you understand.