NaNo the other half: winner

The wrap up party for NaNoWriMo is called Thank God it's Over. I never really understood that name; sure, it was hard, but I usually finished at least a couple of days before the 30th, with an enormous margin to par from pretty much the first week. Not so this year. This year, it really felt like thanking the universe for this (self-afflicted, I am aware) ordeal to be over.
Which it now is! I just wrote the final of my 50,020 words, wrapping up the story and the storyline, finishing off my character's development and plunging me into one last day of November that is NaNo-free. I don't think I've ever written this many days consecutively, usually I'm so far ahead I can skip a day or two in between. Not so this year, although this year I also wanted to get all the badges, which means writing 21 days in a row. Some days, that meant I just wrote 100 words, or thereabouts. My word count graph per day looks like an interesting roller coaster:

Yup, that really is a low point of 120 words.

Maybe it was a very busy year at work (which would explain the lack of blogging too), but I can't remember it being this hard in other years. Or maybe it was my subject matter, which was a bit more personal and emotional than I'd anticipated. Or maybe my characters just didn't want to be in my story (I can't blame them). Whatever it was, out of the 7 NaNo's I've 'won', this was by far the most difficult. I'm hoping I'll feel the accompanying feeling of 'most accomplished' soon too, for now I mostly feel relieved and intensely tired.
Tomorrow, I can start doing all those other things I do in my spare moments, such as actually finishing the Harry Potter novel I've been reading for three weeks now. NaNo is great for forcing yourself to write, but it's good that it's confined to one month a year. But, inevitably, I'll put myself through this again next year, with fresh enthusiasm, which I'll probably start to feel coming in tomorrow. But for now, sleep.