55555

Did you know that 5's my favourite number?


At 10.50pm yesterday, one hour ten minutes before the NaNoWriMo deadline, I finished my novel, and it had 55,555 words. Five fives.... To get the word tally exactly right I had an expandable/contractable paragraph, where a goblin hijacked a computer keyboard and typed the word 'fuck' a lot.

It must be something to do with the blogging..? I didn't really know where my story was going when I started NaNoWriMo, but it ended up being about 'me me me'. It involved Tooting Bec magic, stickers, stalkers, adventures, and not enjoying being in love as much as you'd expect. My plot involved a heroine who was writing a novel in a month - in an attempt to solve a problem and get happy, or else to make it her 50,000 word suicide note. But don't worry, it was all fiction! Yes, completely... I didn't really have obsessive stalker tendencies towards a minor celeb, did I?

Steve and I bought two bottles of champagne, one for each of our books. The champagne could only be opened if we managed 50,000 words by midnight on 30th November. We added a new twist to the NaNoWriMo challenge - the champagne was ours only if we gave each story a happy ending.

The happy ending might have proved the hardest challenge. Steve didn't tell me much about his story, but it seemed to have a character dying every ten pages. I imagined his hero drinking, smoking, and hating himself, as he moodily contemplating the messy decapitation of a beautiful woman.

My heroine spent her time comically looking for reasons to rule out self destructive methods. She'd dismissed knife, gun, gas, poison and Tooting Bec tube train. At the 53,000 word point she'd dumped her boyfriend intending to make herself even more miserable. Only a desperate push to write the magic 55,555 words gave my book any hope of a happy ever after. The book finished on 55,556 words. And still a happy-ish ending.

Steve worked all night covering a poker tournament on Wednesday, so woke up late on the final NaNoWriMo day with 5000 words to write. As an incentive for him to get words written I told him I'd rather delete words from my novel than finish on my own. We decided we had to type 'The End' simultaneously.

We drank Steve's Moet when we'd finished those final words, accompanied by cream cheese bagels. We were both starving as we hadn't had time to get tea.

I scraped a happy ending into my last 230 words, thanks to magic stickers. But my heroine's ambition to change her life by writing a novel might need to be accomplished in a rewrite.

So now it's back to normal life rather than bashing out words in every spare moment. I complained to Steve for suggesting the 'stupid' word bashing exercise, but now I think I'll miss it. We've both realised we like nights in my living room, on the red sofa, my legs on his lap, gherkins on the coffee table, beer poured in glasses, iTunes playlists playing, and laptops for two. So tonight I'm starting my screenplay, and Steve's going to finish a journalism course he started a while ago.

I want to forget projects that last a month, but Steve seems to have found a new one. He just emailed me this...

'In the 'imaginary advent calendar carried around in Steve's head' advent calendar, today's picture is a tangerine. Don't ask me, I don't choose these things you know? :oP'

In the chaos of finishing my book I forgot to make my heroine return to stickering. So I think I might do that for her, and start with an orange tangerine.

And if I was like her, and continued a kind of writing quest to find a happy ending, I might do it in replies to emails from Steve, and happy blog posts, and opening imaginary advent calendar doors in an imaginary advent calendar carried in my wonderful boyfriend's head.

I don't have an advent calendar for Steve, but atthe end of December I hope I can show him a tube poster full of stickers. That thought is part of my happily ever after.