Word Count: 50,053

It's over. I finished the 50,000 in a month. Of course, this is a miserable mess of a rough draft. It needs more scenes, it needs rewriting, it needs a lot of changes to make it even marginal. But I do have a purple winner's bar.

I did this in the face of odds, too: not just work, not just my own writer's block, but in the past couple of days, I've had oral surgery, a drug hangover from the Vicodin the dentist gave me, Thanksgiving dinner with various good friends, an allergic reaction at dinner (small but interesting -- my upper lip swelled up like I'd been hit with a basketball), Benadryl and subsequent unconsciousness, and fascinating struggles today with the Benadryl hangover, the despair engendered by continuing allergic reactions, and the book itself.

It's not done. I need to keep working on it. I love it. It's going to last me a long while. But I still feel as though I had shot my favorite child.