Maybe next year I'll make it to 50k.

NO! NO! This year! You can totally still win! It's been done! I knew a girl who wrote 50k in five days and you only have to write half of that in five days! Write, write, write! You can hit that 50,000, don't give up! Don't give up! Pretty please?

...In the unheard of, undesired, and unwanted event that you do go down. Go down screaming bloody murder. Don't give up without a hugely monsterous fight.

I hear you, Aslan's Country! I am horrible at killing off characters and not making it stupid. I pretty much don't kill off characters or else I shut my eyes and try not to think too hard about how horribly unrealistic it is. Hopefully you have got over that hump by now.

Congratulations to all you green bared folks! Good luck at achieving your overachiever goals!

Wait...
Tuesday's the last day??

Somehow I just realized this. My mind was convinced that I had another week (Dear Subconscious - thanks so much for your help! Ugh!). I don't think getting to 50K is going to be a problem, but I really wanted to actually the finish the story (which I suspect will be around the 70-80K range, but that's a guess)!

How am I going to do this?? (Combined with the fact that I'm supposed to have an extensive video project ready to ship by Tuesday...)

Answer: Dear Facebook chat, I'll see you on Wednesday. (If I'm going to stay up 'til 1AM, it's gonna be because of writing.) Same to you GIMP.

Watch out, Gymfan! I just turned off Facebook chat!!!

Also - YOU (Gymfan) HAVE A SHINY PURPLE BAR AND IT'S GORGEOUS!!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!! I'm off to eat turkey, green bean casserole, and sneak away during the football games to beat Gymfan in the word war!!

*cracks knuckles* Oh, I don't know about that.

Keep going everyone, keep going! Thanksgiving smanksgiving. When everyone else has passed out from the turkey and potatoes, you can sneak on the computer and write and write and write. Buawhahaha!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Eat your share of food and remember to interact with family members...but remind them all that it's still NaNoWriMo and you are obligated to WRITE WRITE WRITE!!!

tps, I understand how you feel about finishing your story...mine is never going to be done before November's end. I honestly think it'll be closer to 100k, probably longer. (I'm such an overachiever ) If November's over and you want some extra modivation to finish, feel free to PM me, and maybe we can have a post-NaNo, finish-up-your-novel write-a-thon or something.

Just one quick question about validation - can you validate your novel, then go back and re-validate if you write more and update your word count? Or does it not matter as long as you're over 50k?

You can re-update your word count, Silver, I know that. I'm not sure if you have to re-copy and paste the whole book again though.

I have my purple bar. The only thing I don't like is I have major major major problems with adobe reader so I can't print out my winner certificate. *headdesk* I've been having problems for a long time. Really irritating. Oh well, I have until Ocotobr to print it out and even if I can't, I don't care. I have my purple bar and the little circles on my profile saying what years I've won and lost.

Is anyone doing Script Frenzy in April? I'm considering it but I haven't decided yet. It'd be cool though!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!! I hope you all have an awesome day. We're having 12 people over for dinner not including my grandma to make 19 total!! Stuffing and potatos and ham and turkey and all kinds of other yummy stuff. (Why isn't there a pigging out smiley?)

Once you validate, your account is credited with the win. So even if you write more, you don't have to re-validate; you can just update your word count via your normal updating method.

I.e. I validated my novel, and it ate almost 3k in words. I have NEVER had that happen! But then I wrote a little more, and when I went to re-update my word count (by Google Doc's count) I just put it back up to where it was. As long as your account is validated, I don't think it really matters if you end up sticking with "their" word count or not. The only time that would matter is if you're just on the cusp of 50k and their validator eats a tun of words. But since I was far, far over, I don't mind going by Google Doc's word count rather than NaNo's.

Does that make sense?

Awesome! Thanks, guys. I just validated and got my pretty purple bar! Shiny! Oddly enough, it added about 100 words to my count. Sorry about that 3k loss, Gymfan! I wonder how that happened.

I lost only 6 words with the validation. If I had lost 3k I would have been in a spot, I tell you!

I've never lost words before, so yes, I'm puzzled too. I've been using the same word processor (Google Docs) all three years I've done NaNo. The first year I gained maybe 1k, the second year I think I gained about a hundred words or so, and this year I lost 3k. That's such a large difference that I'm wondering if maybe I didn't copy over all my words from my document or something. Oh well; it's nothing to get my knickers in a twist over. I have more than enough words to get me by and I went ahead and "fixed" my word count manually, so it's all good.

Ooooh, you guys are making me jealous! I'm not going to validate until I hit 100k/finish my novel, but all those preeeetty purple bars are tempting me.

Oh, how I hope it doesn't eat 3k of my words, because I need those. I've just hit 90k, so I'm feeling pretty okay. I'm on the last few chapters now! Hopefully I can write more tomorrow before I have to go work a long weekend.

100k...wow!

Congrats to all those proud owners of purple bars! I'm going to validate my story in the next day or so.

My story (like last year's) occurs in the fall and winter, so I get to write something about Christmas each time. Now that Thanksgiving is past, I'm writing my Christmas chapter. It includes a reference to an a cappella singing of "Silent Night" (under a silent, star-filled night, naturally ).

And... I did it. I validated my word count at nearly midnight last night, updated my facebook status and tried not to scream (in both celebration and pain). Over all, this was an amazing month. So glad I participated.

For those who have yet to finsh: YOU CAN DO THIS!!!!!!

NO! NO! This year! You can totally still win! It's been done! I knew a girl who wrote 50k in five days and you only have to write half of that in five days! Write, write, write! You can hit that 50,000, don't give up! Don't give up! Pretty please?

...In the unheard of, undesired, and unwanted event that you do go down. Go down screaming bloody murder. Don't give up without a hugely monsterous fight.

My dear Orious, your pep talk was most welcome (and indeed, more helpful than the ones sent out on the NaNo site). Once I got your message, I actually began to think that maybe this is actually possible. After all, if someone could write 50k in five days, what was 25k? I would just have to write more than I had been, and not procrastinate.

Yesterday I was at 25k. By the end of the day I had 32k. I had 32k today and wrote the majority of my words this morning. Now I'm at 38k and still writing. I'm hoping to get to 40k today, and after that it'll pretty much be a done deal that I can do this (provided the world doesn't blow up and we all die, in which case I don't think anyone would be working on their novels...)

At any rate, I am not going down without an extremely hard and monstrous fight.

By the way, I finally signed up on the NaNo site. (Better late than never, I suppose.) If anyone wants to add me, I'm ScarlettGamgee (a combination of my two favorite characters at the moment, Will Scarlett & Sam Gamgee ).

Conga-rats to Melian_Maia, ChristProclamer, Meltintalle, stargazer, and anyone else that's won. If I forgot you, consider yourself mentioned.

And if you're still working on it, then GO GO GO! We can do this!

^Um, wow. Great job, is all I can say! Let's keep going to the finish!

I hear you, Aslan's Country! I am horrible at killing off characters and not making it stupid. I pretty much don't kill off characters or else I shut my eyes and try not to think too hard about how horribly unrealistic it is. Hopefully you have got over that hump by now.

Thanks for the sympathy. By yesterday, I'd mostly gotten over it, at last , and I'll see how today goes. It was kind of necessary to add further development to the story, and the character, but it would have been preferable to have the character in question captured, or taken away in some other way, so as to not kill the motivation of my MC completely. But that would cause further complications.. besides, there's just not enough time to go back and change it.

At the moment, I feel like my novel will come to a pretty good close at around 50,000 words, after going from thinking it would be far over, to not feeling like I could reaching 50k. It wouldn't feel right to have gotten 50k by November 30th, but be just slightly short on the end of my story.

I still have 2000 words to go to reach my goal for this year - I have other more important tasks to do first, but I can put in little bits in the breaks!

Which reminds me, I've written some little bits since I last updated - perhaps I only need 1500 words now?

As my personal goal is less than 50,000, I won't get the pretty bar, but I would still feel satisfaction

Congratulations to all those of you who did get the pretty bar, though!