I don’t do this very often, so please allow me a moment to bask in my own glory. I survived NaNoWriMo 2015! In other words, I wrote nearly an entire rough draft of a novel in thirty days. This makes me, if not an official winner, pretty darn close.

For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, is an international event where you sign up and commit to write the rough draft of a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.

I didn’t quite make it, but I came close. In fact, this is the most I’ve ever written in such a short time. November has always been a busy month for me, what with Thanksgiving, spending time with family, extra work commitments, school programs, visits from relatives, etc. For a brief nanosecond I considered leaving my family to their own devices (turkey TV dinners anyone?) on Thanksgiving, but I couldn’t go through with it in the end. I guess that makes me, if not exactly a hero, a pretty good mom.

Speaking of heroes, Marvin had ten days of vacation time that he had to use or lose before the end of the year, and he chose to use it helping me! I’ll admit I didn’t spend every minute of his staycation holed up in my office ignoring him, but I came close. While I wrote, he attended to my dad’s needs (driving him to medical appointments, fixing meals, running errands) and did way more than his fair share of chores so I could at least stay in the running. Thank you Sweetie. You are the best. Ever.

I also owe a big thank you to all of my non-writing friends who cut me slack when I said I was too busy to hang out with them all month. Thank you all for respecting that and agreeing to reschedule later.

And a final thank you to the NaNoWriMo community. You guys are the most supportive group I’ve ever been a part of. Congratulations to all of you who finished!

My goal now is to finish the rough draft (and it definitely is rough!) in the next two weeks, give it a rest, and start the second draft in January. Cheers!