However, I did get that last 25 words, and when I did my update, suddenly I got the “You’re A Winner” screen!

W00t! Go me!

I am insanely pleased – even though I haven’t really finished The Novel as such, I know I’ve produced quite a lot – something I really wouldn’t have thought I could have done. It’s been a long slog, and there’s been a lot of ups and down – just look at my graph!

You can celebrate along with me by looking at my NaNoWriMo profile, which has a snazzy banner I never saw before. And blue bars over 50k! So very cute! And I’ll probably put one of the winning icons in the page somewhere, when I can be bothered.

On a slightly more serious note, NaNoWriMo does a lot of good work other than organising the Wri itself; every year they set up libraries in places that otherwise might not ever get one. This year it’s Vietnam. So please go check out The NaNoWriMo Donation and Store Page and see if you can feel moved to being generous. I’ve donated myself this year (it seemed only fair); possibly the lure of having a shining halo over your profile pic might not inspire people not NaNoWriMoing themselves, but just think of little kids getting their first introduction to the wonder of books.

Anyway, I don’t want to just stop, especially as December is often referred to as National Novel Finishing Month (but I think it might even take longer than that!); however, I do now have some more spare time for other creative pursuits, including doing some more 3D work.

But tomorrow, I think I may relax

I did get my NaNoWriMo graph maker to cope with graphs that go over fifty thousand; it should also always return an image, even if it fails to get any NaNoWriMo data (before it supplied a text error message, which presumably would break anything that was expecting an image).

Less than two thousand words to go. Blimey.

I’m going to have to rejig my graph thingy so it deals with totals over 50K at some point…

In other news, for those who are interested in Star Trek Fan Films, Star Trek New Voyages have finally released their latest episode, To Serve All My Days. This has the distinction of being a fan film actually written by a Star Trek Original Series author (D.C. Fontana) and starring a Star Trek Original Series actor reprising his role (Walter Koenig as Chekov). I’ve only watched their “teaser”, so I can’t give a full review, but the CGI effects look lovely, and their recast Chekov (they’ve recast all the Original Series roles; Koenig appear to play an older Chekov) isn’t as excruciatingly awful as “recast Chekov” might make you first think.

I may post more assuming I ever get around to watching it all.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Conan the Destroyer is on.

I’ve just finished the morning session, and already things aren’t going to plan. Instead of 1500 words, I’ve done 1837. So my schedule’s already shot…

I’m about where I got to by the end of this time last year. And I still have days in hand!

Can’t believe it’s almost over…

Only one more day of work before my week off. Yes!

Very much looking forward to the next week being off; if I get some outline work done over the weekend, I could still be easily on my way to finishing.

For those who are wondering, Sam and the three babies he’s looking after have just met the leader of the nursery chimp group, who will be looking after the babies from now on. Which is going to leave Sam at something of a loose end. What shall he do next?

Incidentally, I’ve not been neglecting you; Blogger’s just been refusing to publish, at least from the Laptop. It seem to allow the desktop machine to play, however.

However, did actually get some words in, unlike yesterday. I do dislike ending the day on a zero count.

Hopefully, I’ll feel better tomorrow; I still have my Evil Backup Plan, in that I have taken the last week of November off.

The Spam Surge seems to have slackened off some, but I have still put in place one of the easier anti-Spam strategies; you keep your Inbox completely clean. Everything that you expect to come into your mailbox you have a Filter set up to put it into a folder of some kind. That way, pretty much everything that turns up in your Inbox is either Spam, or something you haven’t yet set up a filter for.

All this means is that when you check your mail, you can select them all (usually Control+a), deselect any messages that aren’t spam, and then there should be some simple keystrokes to delete all the junk (I use Thunderbird, so that’s Control+m to mark them as read, then j to flag them a Junk (which also puts them in the Trash). Easy peasy.