man, if you thought i was high beFORE, dude. dood! DOOD! (^___^) a 3x wide smiley does not BEGIN to cover it. i am so awesome. i am! this? this right here? this is more awesome than one word can cover. i am so awesome, i have crossed the line into ossum! i’m so awesome, the internet had a to invent a word to cover how awesome i am. … yeah, okay, that’s enough. seriously, i’m getting lightheaded. man. it is pretty awesome, though. –oh, sorry, “ossum.” i know i say this every year, but this year? THIS YEAR i was sure for a minute there that i wasn’t going to make it. it was like, 35k words, and i was like, man, i actually /care/ about this story, and nothing was making sense. i had loose threads ALL over the place, and then my choir’s extra long practice day was right in the middle of week two, and then my priest’s last day was right in the middle of week three, and then my upstairs neighbor came home and played his music all loud, and i flew into my customary righteous indignation mode, etc etc et-novelus-interruptus-cetera. but then i realized that if i didn’t win, it would be my first fail in SEVEN years of doing NaNo. that’s right, my record would be Win Win Win Win Win Win FAIL. and then i also realized that i really did care about this story. nevermind losing, if i didn’t write the story, it wouldn’t get written. my poor characters would be stuck there, forever mired in the craptastic middle i had left them with. it was time to outsmart myself, as my old workshop professor would say, and get my characters down from the tree. luckily, their descent took just under twenty thousand words. somehow or other, most of the things i thought were pointless loose ends got tied up as i discovered more and more things about my characters and their horrible horrible pasts. i had a lot of fun killing three or four people one night, and so i resolved to get my main characters shot. incidentally, my one main character seems un-shoot-at-able. my other main character, god bless him, gets shot at all the time, and actually got hit two or three times in that final scene, but the other chap just refuses to get shot at. he does shoot a dude right in the face though, and manages to violate his own code of ethics in protection of his best friend, so maybe he didn’t escape unscathed after all. (^_^) what i’m really proud of this month, though, is that the story’s finished. i have a bad habit of ending NaNo without a completed story. my NaNo from a couple years ago, that i’ve been editing off and on all year, has no ending scene. i know exactly what it looks like, which may be the problem, but i just haven’t sat down and written the damn thing yet. in this story, i knew the ending even before i knew the beginning, and i was worried that i would get bored and just not write it, when it came down to it. but i did write it, and i have to say, I FEEL DAMN GOOD ABOUT THAT. in fact, i feel so good, that i feel like writing something else. that’s right, i wrote 3300+ words in the past three hours and i’m like, MOAR WORDS PLZ~ we’ll see if that lasts. ~meredeth. victorious. 
/me takes a Don’t Stop Believin’ break .
FACT 175 – SWEET SWEET VICTORY!
