Word count: 50,012

Chapters Written: 30

Money raised for Equal Writes (so far): $525

Story to go: a lot!

At 10:45 (or thereabouts) I passed the 50,000 word mark in my National Novel Writing Month novel, Barbarism. I ended Chapter 30 heading into a pretty major plot twist that my characters led me toward and I didn’t even expect.

It’s been a struggle the last few days with my characters leading the way and leading the story to do logical things, but lead toward dead ends and difficult ways out. So moving on from those events have been hard, but I’ve done it.

I’ve also struggled a lot with the character development scenes and the parts where the characters grow closer and get to know each other. Whereas conversation with conflict (i.e. arguments, usually political ones) work fine.

But things seem pretty good at the moment, after concurring some of those difficult scenes. There is still a lot of story to go, and thankfully there isn’t that urge to stop just because I’ve reached a word count target.

I got a buzz from finishing. It’s easily the longest thing I’ve written, it’s a huge goal. This being my sixth attempt and first victory, I felt like it was just something I couldn’t do, but I have. I’m going to let myself gloat, have bragging rights, feel like I did something special.

I danced and high-fived and am drinking a gin and ginger ale to celebrate with choc-coated coffee beans* beside me to munch on too.

There was cheers on Facebook, Twitter, the NaNo-chatroom and in my house. It was good. I had people cheering me on.

But the buzz of finishing the whole first draft will be bigger. Maybe I’m a buzz junkie because it’s pushing me on.

*the coffee beans were a very kind donation from Jodi Cleghorn for every 10,000 words I wrote. Thank you!