And the Winner is....

Not me. Yes, if you've been sitting on the edge of your seat, chewing your nails in frustration as you waited to hear the results of my epic NaNoWriMo challenge, I'm afraid my news is slightly sour.
Did I make it? Not officially. Last night when I got home from work I had 6500 words to go. Stationing myself at my computer I wrote like a demon, not stopping for a moment until I reached the end of my novel. That's right. I finished it. Unfortunately, my novel was incontrovertibly finished with 1400 words to go. Refusing to give up, I bull-shitted my way to 50,004, although I'll admit that those 1400 words had absolutely nothing to do with the story. There was just nothing more to add. There were two minutes left until midnight when I uploaded my novel onto the website and submitted it to their word counter, which came back saying I'd written only 49,373 words. What? There wasn't time to do anything more about it, and I definitely couldn't have come up with another 700 words of bull shit, so I gave up and went to bed, pretty disappointed.
Today, however, I feel pretty good. I may not have earned an official badge from the website (although I will admit I feel a little ripped off there, I did after all write over 50,000 words), but I did finish writing an entire novel, start to finish in just thirty days. That's pretty cool. So, although I have no official badge, I've decided to declare myself a winner. I wrote an entire novel in a month, while working a full time job and attempting to carry on a normal life. I'm positively exhausted, but I'm proud of myself. I declare my first attempt at NaNoWriMo a nearly complete success!