Winning NaNo

The steampunk book crossed the 50K threshold this morning, so I've officially won NaNoWriMo. Given that this is my first year attempting this (since it was the first year since I've started writing novel-length fiction that I haven't had a deadline to meet in November) I has some thoughts about this.

1) YAY! I wrote fifty thousand words in twenty-seven days . That is pretty darn impressive. Most mornings, I got up an hour earlier than the rest of the household. This is a habit I plan to continue into the near year, because it made for great production and a happy writer-mom.

2) I am nowhere near being "done" with this novel. I don't write fifty-thousand word novels... mine tend to be seventy to eighty thousand. I figure I have a third of a book yet to write, and the plan is to do that over the next 2-3 weeks. The manuscript as it stands now also has all these lovely, lovely holes of "research this" and "need name here" and "what did I call that earlier???" I was filling those bits in during evening editing sessions, but quickly fell behind given that people around here like to eat dinner on a fairly regular basis and I prefer both the kids be clean and in their pajamas at some point before bed.

3) Even if I'd written eighty thousand words and typed THE END, I still wouldn't be "done" with this novel. It needs major editing. It needs proofreading. I don't have any plans of showing it to anyone anytime soon, and that includes friends, family, agent, etc. Hot copy needs time to cool. You wouldn't eat a cheesecake straight out of the oven, would ya?
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Ok, maybe I will share the first few chapters with people via email. But I don't really want notes-notes. (Say that like the :"like yous" in "does he like you, or LIKE YOU like you ?") I just need to hear if I've broken anything major and that it's super shiny and keep working on it dammit, it's going to take the world by storm. Notes other than that aren't helpful.

4) At least, they aren't helpful yet, anyway. When I've had a chance to let it cool, read it through, fix the major stuff, THEN I need notes-notes. The kind that make me feel vaguely stupid and want to tear out my hair because I even wrote those words in the first place and what was I thinking and this scene is slow and there's not enough tension here and go back and plant this bit earlier.

5) Even when it goes out on submission, it's not really "done" because the hope is some editor somewhere will like it enough to buy it and make me rewrite it again. Each of the theater books went through two major revisions, not including copy edits and page proofs.

6) So, the moral to the story, kids? That Emerald City is twinkling in the distance. Keep skip-walking arm-in-arm with your wobble-legged Scarecrow story.

And don't stop walking just because the calendar ticks over to December.