My ship crossed the finish line a day early

When I got within about 127 words of reaching the goal of having a 50,000-word draft of my novel (which doesn't mean it's finished, of course), I furled the sails and waited. Then last evening I went off to our region's Big Push Write-In wearing a new t-shirt, given to me by my friend in honor of this momentous occasion. On the front of it are these words:
Careful, or you'll
end up in my novel
And there, among friends, I typed the last words needed to cross the line for NaNoWriMo's word-count goal. No, I didn't stand up and cheer and shout, but it was fun to share that time with them. Then I entered the word count in the meter at the top of my profile page, confusing the wrimo sitting next to me. Yes, it was deliberate -- because I wanted to see my word-count meter turn solid green. Then (and only then) did I put the **whole** kit and caboodle through the validator to see the meter turn gloriously purple with WINNER! across the face of it. Wanna see?


Or visit my Bookbuddybonnie profile page to read all about it.

Wanna see what I've been doing?

Absolute Vanilla wrote this comment on my previous post:

"Bonnie, are you okay? There seems to have been no blogging activity for a long while - or are you just very busy with NaNo? Do so hope all is well."

Then she signed off with this: "xxx"

Isn't she sweet? Here's what I say to her (and everyone else who has wondered what's happening in my life):


On September 23rd, I got an email that said, "Bookbuddybonnie, you are now an administrator for the group
United States :: Tennessee :: Chattanooga." Here's how I felt about taking on a volunteer job that takes lots of time and energy and pays nothing ... except joy, of course:


Never fear, dear Vanilla, all is well. Actually, I have been blogging like mad over on my NaNo blog for this year ... Bonnie's NaNoWriMo* 2008.

...and monitoring and writing on the forum for the Chattanooga Region of Nano, which already has 17 threads. I monitor this board because I'm the municipal liaison for my town, what you could think of as the link between the powers that be and the 78 people here. Herding writers is kind of like herding cats. Tonight we are having a 3-hour party at the home of an enthusiastic member of our group. (We've been meeting once or twice a week and two hours at a time was not enough for these folks.) According to the statistics that accompany my user name wherever it goes on the NaNoWriMo site, I have written 71 posts, so far, on our forum.

Though these two writing projects amount to many, many words, the real BIGGIE is, of course, the NaNoWriMo project itself. Today is the exact middle of the month of November (NaNo month) and before the end of the day I expect to have completed 25,000 words of the 50,000-word, rough-draft-novel goal for all Wrimos. Yay, me! You can keep up with my progress on that link to my other blog ... I have my daily goals set out there, plus how much I actually achieved each day (see it on that blog's sidebar).

Do you suppose I've done enough writing in two weeks to exempt me from posting here as well? Ah, but my friends need to know I'm doing well ... it's just that I'm not doing it here.

Sorry. I still love you all. Oh, one more thing ... two of my grandchildren got married in October and the one whose wedding was out of town had a reception here in Chattanooga a week ago. I went. (Until I wrote this for Vanilla, I hadn't realized how busy I've been!)

Love,
~~~ Bonnie