Lulu

Received in the mail today: four printed copies of my first draft from lulu.com. Why would I have a 6"x9" perfect-bound book made out of my first draft? I guess because I'm proud of having finished my story within the month of November, and this is the first time I've written this much on a story before, and this is the first time I've won NaNoWriMo (in addition to it being my first attempt). What can I say? I was excited.

The front cover uses a canned image of clouds and lightning, and the title shows up nicely there. My name at the bottom in white looks weird to me. In my opinion, it's too big. Then again, when I feel insecure about stuff, I want it to be as close to invisible as possible.

The spine looks alright. I selected a beige-ish color, and it goes well with the cover.

The back cover has a picture of me, but my face is all blotchy in the print. Maybe my face is normally like that, but I'd rather that printed pictures of me be touched up a bit, I guess.

On the inside, we jump STRAIGHT INTO THE STORY. Oops! I totally spaced that you might want little things like title page, table of contents, things of that nature. The print itself is a little bigger than I would normally like. It's almost an easy-reading edition! That's why it reached 150 pages.

All in all, I'm happy with how it turned out. I bought four copies: one to put on the shelf for posterity (and future embarassment), one for my friend who wants to know how the story ends, one for my girlfriend who had to put up with me writing all month, and one for me to totally make notes in and treat like the first draft little bitch that it is.

2008 Winner

I got back from Texas and found an internet connection just in time to get the "winner" badge for 2008. My official NaNoWriMo word count is 51,434 words. Woohoo!

Of course, "winner" for NaNoWriMo simply means that I was able to put 50,000 or more words down into a story. It's not like I was being judged or anything. Chris, who pointed me to the NaNo site, also won this year. /applause

I tried to get several people interested - people that I know enjoy writing. My daughter Cady is listed as having 533 words before she got distracted with other bright, shiny objects. My daughter Erika shows 9,568 words before working on other stories and getting frustrated with the slowness of the NaNo site. Shelly (mom of my two younger kids) got to 2,980 words. Last I heard, she was playing World of Warcraft. /poke

During the process, I got a call from Doug Denning (Croaker), who saw my name on the message board. He reached 25,848 words. According to the NaNo site stats for him, he took about 20 days off, so he did that in about 10 days of actual writing. That means he matched my pace (2,500 words a day or so) on the days he wrote. I finished writing on 11/22, before we left for Texas.

The other three on my writing buddies list were DorkmanScott (of Ryan vs. Dorkman fame), who according to his blog, his blog being the reason I put this blog together, wrote more than he updated the NaNo site, and marikurisato and willwrite4chocolate, who are local Denver people I added because they had word counts ahead of mine, and I wanted to use their progress to help motivate me. It amuses me that just after I did that, I didn't see their word counts move again until after I finished.

Ah, well, thank goodness it's over. I think there might be a party somewhere to celebrate. I should go.