I kind of hate NaNoWriMo a little bit

OH. MY. GOSH. The past ten minutes have been intense and excruciating. I went into the next to last day of NaNoWriMo today at 46,000 words. Ish. I wanted to knock it out today, since tomorrow is the last day and I also have yet to read the book for class tomorrow night (due to the fact that I hate school). But I spent the whole day wasting time by putting up way too many Christmas trees in my house (which were awesome, and will shortly appear on this blog), and didn't start writing until around 6 pm.

Then I somehow got motivated and just kept going and decided to knock the whole thing out. So I finished up a little after 8 o'clock with around 50,300 words (according to Open Office). I was relieved, because I had written the ending a while back, and I had just gotten to the ending, so I was out of plot. Figuring I was good to go, I used an algorithm to randomize my novel (so no one could steal it off the NaNoWriMo server, because it's clearly a future bestseller!) and uploaded it. Imagine my surprise. . .and fury. . . when it set my word count back to 49,345 words. Apparently there is a discrepancy of 1,000 words between their word counter and mine!

Did I mention I was out of plot at this time? I went back into my novel, pretty much picked a paragraph at random and started adding tons of descriptions of wherever the heck the characters had happened to be in this scene. I then uploaded it again. It returned a word count of 49,645 words-ish. By this point, I'm pretty much furious and punching the couch, yelling, etc. I go back and add some more flowery nonsense to my novel. Finally, just before I'm about to have a heart attack and chuck my laptop across the room, the thing gives me a word count of 50,006. 6 words to spare. I'll take it. By this point, I'm pretty much hating NaNoWriMo. The daily writing had gotten to be almost like torture, and their word count validator was just the icing on the cake of torture. I say all this now, but I like to punish myself, so I'm sure next November I'll be on here ranting again about the pain that is NaNoWriMo, just as I have for four Novembers in a row now.

But for now, I'll just be relieved that it's over. And I guess it was cool that I actually finished the plot this year (a first), because now I'll be able to get a free copy of my novel actually printed like a book, which will be cool, even though I'm hating everything about my novel at the moment.

And 50,000 words of a novel is going to seem like nothing when I start tackling those 60 pages of term paper writing I have yet to do. . .especially since I only have a week to write them!