First Draft is FINISHED!!!!!

I did it! I finished the first draft of my current project. Thank you very much NaNo!

I'm so so so relieved. If you were to ask me last July if I would even have written this book, I would have told you NO WAY. It's beyond me. Too hard to write. Too different than what I've written before.

But then one of my crit partners said a very interesting thing after I told her my reasons. She said, "Then you need to write it."

So I did.

Wow. Now, I don't know if it will sell. I don't even know if my agent is going to like it! But that doesn't matter right now. Because I wrote a book that I needed to write and I was able to grow as a writer.

As a teacher, I'm continually pushing my students to step out of their comfort zones saying things like, "You can write five sentences, okay, let's make it 8." Or I might say, "You can write 8 sentences, let's spice it up with adjectives."

I pushed hard this past month using NaNo as my excuse. I wrote 35,000 words in November which was probably one of my busiest months ever (like as in my-entire-life ever). It made me realize how important time management was and how critical goal setting can be.

But it doesn't stop there. I still have a long ways to go before I'm ready to send it off.

I opened the document today after giving myself a couple of days 'off' and groaned. The first chapter sucks. The last chapter is horrendous. My only consolation is the middle is pretty intense and at least I'm feeling good about that.

I've made a plan of action (yes, I'm a sucker for deadlines- I know, I'm weird) and I feel empowered now. I'll blog more on that later this week.

And YES! As promised, I'll be giving away BOOKS to celebrate. More on those details later in the week too.

So for those of you who did NaNo, how did your progress go? And if you didn't, what do you do to motivate yourself?