A few more typos for fun and enjoyment:

"She toot to her room directly "
instead of
"She took to her room directly"

Ug. This was written in the heat of things last night. I'll leave you to figure this one out...
"Finallu, she found herself colose enought to examine the strangenes of the palace walls with a sort of wonder usaully reseved for her favorte storeis."

Then, suddenly I could speak Celtic!
"It slowly mekted fromteh outside in."
instead of
"It slowly melted from the outside in."

BTW, I invented the words tehy and teh. My brain just can't fire synopses fast enough to get "they" and "the" to spell correctly. I also misspelled "of" a number of times as "ove" or "fo."

Oh sorry! Final word count = 50,216

Okay, I must admit that I was really scared when I found out that I still had to write 5,000 words on the last day to make it. But to be honest, it was some of the best time writing I had had since the first of the month!

And I promised an excerpt so here you go (remember, these are freshly-borne and subject, in fact, expected to change):

"I see you!" Emma crowed, and leaped after Nick, who laughed again and ran. She was amazed at his speed, and by the way he effortlessly darted behind trees that hid him in such a way that she missed his twists and turns when he scampered off and angled in another direction. And at first, it was almost a splendid game of tag. But the she felt the trees closing in on her again, and she remembered the bird man and the melting horse and the almost- glimpsed fairy and she stopped in her tracks. And she did something she rarely did. She started to bawl.

She just stood there for a moment, totally enveloped by a feeling of madness. "I must be crazy. I must be running around in the woods like a moron. I'll bet no one else can see Nick but me."

The boy in question swung upside-down from a tree just then, his arms crossed over his chest and his cape hanging almost to the ground. He suspended himself next to Emma, and in a concerned tone asked, "Hey, what's the matter?"

She sniffed and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. "Don't ask stupid questions." She said, hiccoughing a little and trying to compose herself.

"I'm sorry. Don't cry. Look," he uncrossed his hands and swung back and forth, monkey- like. "Emma, come on. Look!" She turned and looked at him as he made a goofy face.

My hallucinations are trying to cheer me up. She thought, then saw something shiny slip from one of Nick;s many pockets. "Whoops, " he said, and executed a perfect backwards somersault out of the tree, a move Emma completely missed as she bent to pick up the thing form the forest floor."

I just like the idea of her hallucinations trying to cheer her, and the fact that she totally missed Nick's acrobatics.

You've Won!

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.

Now we leave you to head off to your celebration (or nap, as the case may be).

49,136 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Easy Peasy... man, I'm icing my wrists tonight.

Two hours and counting. Promise at least a few writing samples when this is all over (along with a few of my favorite typos -- "She had her hair tied back in a sort of flippy poop thing with a stick jabbed through the middle to secure it, but mighty tendrils still escaped and bounced annoyingly in her eyes." instead of "...flippy loop thing" )