Tuesday, December 7, 2010

NaNoWriMo Winning Exultation!

Heaven help me, I won my self-imposed National Novel Writing Month challenge!  100,031 words in 30 days.  The last day was the worst--dress rehearsals and performances of Endgame did me in, as did hanging out with family for Thanksgiving, so I wrote nearly 6,000 words on Monday and 9,000 on Tuesday!  I wanted to slit my throat a little, but pushed through it at the last minute because I could not have borne missing my self-imposed goal by only about 100 words or whatever it was at 10 minutes till midnight.

So it's done!  I have this huge manuscript safely locked away on several backup discs, and now I'm off to read as much Arabian and Islamic history as I can.  It'll be a fun Christmas!  I will freely admit that while writing my research was by necessity confined to hallowed halls of learning like Wikipedia and www.sudairy.com, from which I grabbed names, a few phrases, and recipes.

But, while researching Arabian horses of the 9th century, I found out something completely fascinating that I am GLAD many people do not know about, because, uh, this information would probably have been used in Twilight and then it would be more ridiculous than it already is.  Want to guess what this is?

No.  You couldn't.  How could you?  I could not believe it and had to go over the cited pages a few times to make sure I was not hallucinating.  But.

The now-extinct Turkoman horse, slender like a greyhound and with hooves small enough to traverse rocky mountainous paths, was covered in a coat of hair that glittered.

I saw that sentence and burst out laughing so hard that only by the grace of an instinctual hand clap did I escape spitting tea all over the computer screen.

Suddenly I feel that I may have done the Twilight vampires a bit of wrong by mocking their glittery skin so much.  Clearly, uh, it is possible?  Glittery hair, at least.  Glittery like the tinsel wigs you find at party stores.

I am still torn between snorting with laughter and wanting a Turkoman horse of my own.  But come on, world.  This is a clear gift to Mary-Sue authors and nobody, nobody needs to give them more ammunition.  Nobody.  Not even you, history.

But after finishing at midnight on Tuesday, I could not go to sleep--guess I was too used to staying up ridiculously late to finish my daily quota!  So this was that morning's sunrise.  Beautiful, isn't it?






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