It's a good feeling...

...when you accomplish something really hard. I got this letter today:

Dear Novelist,

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It's an amazing accomplishment, and we're proud to have had you writing with us this year.

I'm pretty proud to have done it! Now I'm going to take a bit of a break from it, then I'll have to take it up again, finish off the last two chapters (at least I figure it will just be two more chapters), then return back to the beginning and smooth out the rough edges. That'll be the labour intensive part.

But it feels good to have set myself a challenge and to have met it, even when at times I felt like giving up.