Some of this please:

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And this…

And also this…

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Because this happened last night:

So, yes, all the bells and whistles please. With knobs on. I have ‘won’ NaNoWriMo. Sadly there’s no monetary reward, but nevertheless I feel all warm and snuggly inside and isn’t that reward enough on a dull Sunday morning when the rain is dribbling down my window and I didn’t clean the blender yesterday so in order to have our homemade smoothies I will have to WASH DISHES, which I definitely do not want to do.

But that’s not the end of the story! Regular readers of this ‘ere blog may know that, although I’ve been ‘doing’ NaNo, I didn’t begin my project from scratch. It all began (settle down, children, and I’ll tell you a story) two years ago when a yellow-haired girl appeared in my notebook (I never fought in a war, children, so instead must harp relentlessly on about other matters) and then, yada yada, I got a place on the Writers’ Centre Naar-ich’s (people from Nar-folk will know what I’m doing there) Escalator Literature scheme, followed by an Arts Council grant, and before I knew what was happening I’d committed to writing an actual book about old Yellow Hair. And the rest, children, is history.

The important thing, therefore, having ‘won’ NaNo, was to continue writing immediately. Which I did. I wrote another thousand words last night, and then, goodness gracious me:

And:

And… I just swerved there, when you tried to punch me.

And swerved again.

And I will sleep with one eye open, if you’re planning on coming to smother me.

Can I briefly re-enrol myself for Procrastination 101 and point out that it isn’t a book yet. It’s only a sketch for a book. If I posted a few sample pages you’d all like me again, because there is heaps and heaps of work still to do. My target is 70,000 ‘new words’ + the words I’ve already written = something roughly approximating the length of a novel (82K-ish). A lot of those words will go straight in the bin, but it’s all full of story, story, story, so I’m happy enough. For now.

Is this what it feels like in the end stretch of a novel? I’m genuinely asking. Because I’ve never been at the end stretch of a novel before. Not properly. Not since I was 11, anyway (and thrilled because the teacher wanted to make photocopies of it), and I don’t think it counts.

It’s like being a piñata. And somebody hit me, really hard, on the head, and all the words fell out in a single big burst – and the burst is still happening, it seems, so I’d better get back there and keep scooping up the words before some other writer nicks them.