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They’ve opened the validator for official wins now, so I submitted my manuscript. My official wordcount is 56,121, and thus I have now “won” NaNoWriMo 2008! Yay me! (And the twenty thousand or so other people who will also “win”.)

NaNo has been a blast, every bit as fun and productive as I had hoped, and I can’t wait for next year.

However, there’s still a whole heap of work to do – my 56,000 words contains the bare bones of a decent story, but there’s still lots to be done before I can take it out for walks in public without embarrassment.

When my friend Jo was last in Malta, she decided to buy me a model knight as a present. She intended to send it to me, but what with one thing and another it was a while before she got around to it. But it finally arrived the other day, and I love it to pieces. So, when was Jo last in Malta? 1997! So it’s eleven years late but it was worth the wait. It arrived still wrapped in a page of the July 26th 1997 edition of the Maltese Times (“Telemalta turns loss on cellular phones into a profit.”)

Is he not mighty?

Well. It’s been a funny old couple of days. On Thursday night I was suddenly struck down by some very nasty bug. I felt so awful on Friday – sicker than I can remember being in years. I struggled to keep my word count up, but only managed 1300 words all day, and it was torture. I spent the rest of the day sleeping and eating barley sugars. Then I went to bed early and slept through the night. I felt right as rain in the morning. It being a lovely fine day I got up and went for a hike in the hills, thinking about the next scene I wanted to write. When I got home I sat down at the computer, and it flowed out without effort and without me having to so much as pause for thinking. 8,907 words later, the scene was done and I had cracked the magical 50,000-word mark. I’ve won NaNoWriMo, and on day 15! Yay me! What’s more, I reckon that the scene I wrote today was some of the best writing I’ve ever done. I haven’t been back to review it yet – a big NaNo no-no – so I won’t know until December if it’s any good. But for now I don’t care – I reckon I done good.

The story is still only half-finished, so I fully intend to carry on, but at a much more sedate pace.

I managed to crank out 6,701 words today. Wahoo! This is almost certainly the most I’ve ever managed to write in a day, ever. And none of it was waffly filler either – it was all stuff that I’m sure will be in the final novel, as I currently conceive it, in some form or other. This takes the total to 35,173 words, well over two thirds of the way there. Double wahoo!

There is a small publisher in the USA, Subterranean Press, that has found a most welcome niche to fill – they produce nice, expensive, hard-back editions of genre books in small runs. I’ve bought three so far, and while they are expensive (especially once shipping to New Zealand is factored in), they’ve made a bit of a fan out of me. It’s just so nice to have a book that would usually be released in paperback as a good, solid, well-bound hardback. With dust jackets and everything!

So I was very pleased when my latest purchase (which I ordered some months ago), turned up today: The Best of Michael Swanwick.

Unfortunately my delight was soon tempered: inside the front cover were three pages of errata! Now I can see why these mistakes happened: in each case it’s because of formatting very peculiar indeed for English text. For example, here is one of the errata blocks:

(In the actual printed text, each of these lines has been left-justified, meaning that you lose the tree nature of the diagram.)

Of course mistakes happen, but it’s a shame for such a beautiful book to be so marred. And in a final embarrassment, there’s clearly a mistake in the errata!

Hooray! I got past the half-way point today, and am at present sitting on 25,872 words. I may be half-way in terms of number of words, but sadly not in terms of effort. The problem is that I’ve got to the end of what I had planned in advance, and I’m starting to struggle a bit. I have a whole bunch of scenes, some of which don’t connect well with each other, there are some key plot points I haven’t figured out yet, and I don’t know how it all ends. I don’t want to just waffle at random – I want each scene I write to at least potentially serve the story in some important way, but I can’t do that if I’m hazy on what the story actually is! So, I might have to slacken off the pace a bit and do some more plotting…

Huzzah! Made it past 10,000 words (20%). The count at this stage is 10,959.

This picture cracks me up mightily:

I just love the idea that the people who drive the crawlers that deliver the Space Shuttle stacks from the VAB to the launch pads are in need of direction. But imagine the embarrassment of the person who drives Atlantis to Pad A when it was supposed to go to Pad B! What a faux pas! What a merry ribbing such a person would expect.

I clocked up another 3,200 words today, for a total of 7,466 – well ahead of my 6,000-word quota for the weekend.

The format of the event – the emphasis on quantity rather than quality – is certainly freeing. I found that whenever I got stuck or bored with a scene, I just switched to another one almost in mid sentence, without worrying about how the characters got there.

We also had a meeting of Christchurch “WriMoes” at the Arts Centre. About ten people showed up and we discussed wordcounts and swapped writing anecdotes and so forth while sitting out in the sun. It was pretty cool, and it was interesting to see how varied the WriMoes are – from old crusties like me to school kids who were complaining that their parents hadn’t allowed them to stay up for the Nov 1 00:00:01 launch.

The one bull in the ointment is that the NaNo site has been so heavily thumped in the last couple of days that it’s essentially useless. A big part of the fun is logging your progress and checking on others’, but it’s essentially impossible at the moment. I hope demand drops away and the site becomes usable again soon – but it would be sad if people fell by the wayside just because the site was unusable.

Well, things got off to a good start. I have managed 4218 words today, the most I’ve written in a day for a long time. It’s mostly crap, but that’s allowed (even encouraged!) under the rules, and I’m very happy with the story itself. I think I’m on to something here, although it will take lots of post-NaNo work to bash it into acceptable shape. Still, I’m happy to have got so many words down on day 1.