I've often said that NaNoWriMo is something like a mental marathon. Having never actually run a marathon, this is all conjecture, but it does take a tremendous amount of single-mindedness and mental endurance to crank out nearly 2,000 words a day for 30 days.It should come as no surprise, then, that the relief one feels when it ends is nearly as great (I imagine) as ending a marathon. This is the reason why, though I had told myself I would finish my novel over the summer last year, I somehow never got around to it and so I've had to put my SF novel off again. In fact, now that I've put in another 50,000 words into it and somehow only reached the second of the three main climaxes of the story, I'm getting a little concerned.
Though December has killed my word count (last I looked it was 1/4th November's average--I'm afaid to look now). I am, however, determined to finish this thing once and for all. In fact since the crew at NaNoWriMo have worked out a deal with Amazon's POD publisher to give winner's free proofs of their stories (only good for six months) I have some incentive to finish the thing. I just have some hard decisions to make about how far I'm going to take this thing, to say nothing of a month's worth of messages in my inbox and all these friends requests coming into my facebook page...
