Oh dear.

Is our small Friday night NaNo Support Group meeting happening this week?

And, if it is… am I still allowed?

Or will I have to sit home alone, with my notebook computer, lonely, with just a cold, inert novel to keep me company?

Today has been a comedy of errors, let me tell you.

I hit 50K. I logged on to find out how to get my word count verified… and the NaNo site told me there was an internal server error, and the verification process was down.

Frustrated, I tried to blog my progress. My blog template had vanished and my posts weren’t being published.

Hmm.

I e-mailed the webmaster at NaNo HQ about the verification failure; it bounced back.

By this point, I was positive it was personal. What, did the gods not appreciate the dish of O’Casey’s Irish Cream I had poured for them this morning, anticipating a day of excitement? (Perhaps they misunderstood – I was expecting a little bit of excitement, as in butterflies-in-the-tummy, not asking for nail-biting tension.)

I called Ceri for support. She soothed me. I saved all my chapters into one text file to use up more time.

I used another e-mail address and got through to NaNo HQ; they cleared things up for me. I verified… and my browser crashed just as the congratulatory page with the links showed up.

And my blog still wasn’t publishing.

So I tinkered a bit, and disconnected, and turned things off and on again, and dialed up once more, and lo and behold, Blogger’s got my publishing system functioning again, and I have that grape-alicious bar with the sweet word of “Winner” above my word count in the NaNo tables. Which, incidentally, was higher than I thought – after pasting all twelve chapters into one document, the overall word count was about three thousand higher than I had calculated individually. A pleasant surprise. It means that I actually hit 50K last night, I believe.

So now what?

Well, it’s not like this is the first novel I’ve finished. I’ve written two or three others: one of which was destroyed when I was about eighteen; one of which I’m too fond of as an early teenage work to burn, although it will never, ever see the light of day again; and my thousand page masterpiece that I began in college and finished in university, which scares me every time I think about redrafting it. I’ve rewritten the beginning dozens of times in an effort to get to where it starts improving, namely the middle. It defies me, though.

This NaNo novel, though, is pretty much complete. I think I might write one finishing chapter, an epilogue, really, to decorate it a bit. Then I can revise it. Scanning through it, though, when I had pasted it all into one document, I found myself rather surprised at how much, er, “accidental quality” had slipped in. Yes, there were characters in my original notes and outline that never showed up, whom I had created with certain things in mind; evidently they weren’t needed, and writing something/one in just because s/he/it was in my outline, even if it doesn’t add to the story, is a lousy reason for including it/her/him.

I’m going to do a final spell-check, then print it out, sit down, and read my novel.

Ahem.

Fifty-four thousand, one hundred and sixty-six.

Thank you.

Sick. Headache. Tummy ache.

Must work. Must do freelance writing stuff to pay for kibble.

Novel, only 3000 words away from 50K, voices its siren call from my notebook computer.

Torn.

Novel wins.