Hurrah! And three cheers of whatever bilge you drink. I completed (or “won”, in NaNo parlance) NaNoWriMo 2012. And here’s a badge to prove it:

 It’s a pretty little badge, and the eighth of its type that I have collected. Since 2003, I have failed once (can’t remember why), and I have not started it once (we were moving house during November, and therefore a little busy). So you could say I quite like these time / word count challenges.

So what? Good question. I’ve improved my typing skills over the years, and can now comfortable exceed 1,000 words of creative writing per hour. Unfortunately, that’s where the work on the ‘novels’ has stopped. 50,000 words do not a novel make. Nor are they, ever, good words. Some of them might be good words, but when put together, they don’t amount to a hill of beans. As one of my heroes, Ernest Hemingway famously said: “The first draft of anything is shit.” Oh yes. He must have been looking at my NaNoWriMo entries.

This year, I began three stories, all with a series character, and all with their feet firmly planted in the crime genre. And, unlike previous years, I’ve got to the end of the challenge (but not the end of the stories), and I haven’t fallen out of love with them yet. So the prospects for me actually completing them, and then moving on to editing, are pretty good. Watch this space. In the meantime, I will give my poor fingers a rest, until the next challenge!