throwing up yellowtree on paper.

December 1.

Total words written in the month of November = 50,072.

Total words currently written in Yellowtree = 80,923.

I guess you could say I just barely scraped by, 72 words over the minimum requirement, but it still counts as a victory in their books.

Here's why it counts as a victory in my books. I really could've cared less about the word count and the quantifiable progress I had to track throughout the month, statistical bars rising with each passing day. What mattered the most to me was getting myself into the habit of writing, in hopes that it would become something I make time for every day, whether or not I'm feeling 'inspired', whether or not I like my characters on that particular day.

In reality, I hated my characters for about half of the month. The beautiful, as well as agonizingly difficult part of National Novel Writing Month is that it forced me to just plow ahead, not looking back at what I had written and taking time to edit, but throwing up on the paper so I could look back at the end of the month and actually have something to edit.

Now, I'm still not finished with Yellowtree. I still have quite a bit left to write, and I made it my next goal to finish the rough draft by the end of the January, giving me 62 more days to throw the rest of it up. But thanks to National Novel Writing Month, I know the fallacy of waiting to write until I get a good idea, of holding off because I'm not feeling in the mood, or any of the other cardboard excuses we authors like to come up with to procrastinate. For I have sat at the computer for hours now, feeling completely uninspired and telling myself over and over again that I'm writing crap, it's better to just give up and delete it.

Don't hit backspace.

Not yet, not now. For that is writing. It's the nitty gritty, day-to-day clicks of the keyboard that feel like they're echoing into space, but somehow manage to forge a path in the wilderness when it's dark and I can't see what's in front of me. It's bringing human beings to life when your words feel dead and it's 2 AM. It's the small victory of finding that one perfect sentence in the midst of pages and pages of nonsense. It's hard work and sweat, all while lying down in bed, computer in your lap. It's not glamorous or glitzy, not New York Times bestseller lists and Harry Potter success. It has the potential to become all of that, but only after the hard stuff, only once your brain is mentally exhausted and you start seeing words in the grass.

NaNoWriMo wasn't some breezy blast where I got to accomplish my dreams and earn the right to brag about being an author. Actually, for a lot of the time, it wasn't even that fun. But that's what gives me hope that I'm maturing as an author, the fact that it was somehow still so wildly exhilarating and addictive, the fact that I wanted to keep going even when I hated my book and wanted to make my characters strangle each other so I wouldn't have to keep writing about them. Because deep down, it wasn't a hate of writing that was driving any of it - it was a love of it.

And that, my friends, is how I know it's worth it, and why I'm so crazy passionate about finishing Yellowtree.