Week 14: NaNoWriMo DONE

For my Week 14 Famous Last Words, I am celebrating something I did over the holiday break: I finished my #NaNoWriMo novel. I hit 50,000 words while in the Austin airport! That seems appropriate: I have spent the last two and half years flying back and forth to Austin about 10 times a year to see my dad, and I know that airport inside-out. Recently, Delta added some new gates in a terminal extension, and it's actually fantastic for working: lots of table space where you can sit down and actually get work done, with room to have a mouse pad out, plus coffee of course.

So, on Friday coming home, I had about an hour to spare (I had gotten to the airport extra early expecting crowds, but there were none!), so I grabbed a breakfast taco from the wonderful Peached Tortilla, plus a coffee from Ruta Maya, and then I sat myself down and started writing... and before I realized it, I had hit 50,000 words.

WHOO-HOO! The way that works is you keep track of your word count at the NaNoWriMo site, and then when you hit the 50K for the November novel-writing challenge, you get a certificate, plus they decorate your avatar too. I didn't know about the avatar decoration; I thought that was really cool!

Then, when I got home, my husband had this coffee mug ready: that was such a sweet surprise! He ordered it when I started the NaNoWriMo... and hey, he knew that even if I didn't meet the NaNoWriMo challenge, there would be SOME kind of book in my future to celebrate (ha ha, brave man married to a writer!). But the time to celebrate turned out to be now... So, here is my new favorite coffee mug:

And I'll add a picture here of my other favorite coffee mug, also from husband... this one is because I use a fox avatar online. And... because life. :-)

Anyway, I am really proud of getting this book draft done, and I have a couple of weeks to keep working on it before I have to print out a copy and get it published at Lulu to give to my dad as a Christmas present. So, the next time I go back to Austin (which is in just a few weeks), I will have a book in hand to give him for Christmas. I hope he likes it! I sure have had fun writing it. It's reconnected me with so many of my old interests (Sufi teaching tales, plus stories of Aesop himself), along with a dose of India (Birbal and Tenali Raman)... so I am imagining lots of fun related projects in the future too.