http://phywriter.com/archives/2004/11/30/winner-nanowrimo-2004/ Day 30: 2730 / 2088, 52,164 / 50,000 In which the weary writer discovers the he is now "a novelist", and enjoys a brew with the dogs while watching falling snow, your basic scene of domestic bliss. Oh, yeah, the wife's proud, too. 8) It's official, I've "won" the National Novel Writing Month competition for 2004 with an "official" wordcount of 52,164 words as of this afternoon. The thing is, I didn't upload the final story to my FTP server to share before I left work, and I'm actually lacking the final third of the final chapter. It's a corker. I can't wait to share it with you. I won't share it with you until I can share the entire first draft, so that means tomorrow, people. Probably tomorrow morning. So I'm probably going to clock in around 54,000 words by the time I upload the full story tomorrow, but the goal was to hit 50,000 words by midnight 11/30, and I've done that as of 7am this morning. I'll upload the full rough draft of _The Sky Pirate_ tomorrow morning in .doc and .pdf format, and it will be an interesting ending to the first novel, I promise. I'd like to take a couple moments and reflect on this past month, but I'm going to save that for later. For now, I'm sitting here in my house watching the snow fall (first time this season), with a cold Corona in my hand and two warm puppies in my lap. I am content. As of today, I am a Novelist. I'm sitting here and soaking in that revelation. To quote the theme song from Firefly, http://computercrowsnest.com/sfnews2/04_nov/review1104_9.shtml: Take my love, take my land Take me where I cannot stand I don't care, I'm still free You can't take the sky from me Take me out, to the black Tell 'em I ain't comin' back Burn the land and boil the sea You can't take the sky from me Have no place I can be since I found Serenity But you can't take the sky from me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . johne cook wisconsin, usa johne.cook at gmail.com / jcook at apostate.com http://www.phywriter.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .