FINISHED!!!! 50,000 words exactly.

I finished! I had completed the story, with about 200 words to go, and just wrote a few weird little paragraphs into the last chapter. i looked up when I finished a sentence, and it was at 50,000 words exactly. So what did I do next? I wrote 'THE END' and squealed really loudly. I scared poor Scrubber who is cuddled up on the couch next to me. (Also, technically, my novel is 50,002 words, including 'the end.')

I don't even feel like proofreading this thing but I think I'll send it out to you all really soon. Like, this afternoon. Because this year I have completely let go of needing this thing to be good and make sense and even the typos are a part of this huge accomplishment so I'm proud of them, too.

Here's a final excerpt. I'll try to post nice inspiring pictures on here for you all over the next few days, but I probably won't post any excerpts.

Here's a picture to start with, that has to do with the last part of my book but I won't explain how because that will give too much away.

Just imagine this is actually a pig because this is close to what Daggy wears at the end of the book.

Ok, the excerpt. I had to write two battle scenes today and this is from the first one.

As she approached the crowd, she saw that their movements were not as aimless as she had thought. She felt the car begin to pulse with a thumping bass note that was ringing out over the crowd. The bodies up ahead were moving slowly to the beat, but even as she watched, they began to pick up their pace. They were dancing. 

The song was Justin Bieber’s ‘Heartbreaker’, a fact that Stella only knew because she heard someone shout it out over the music. However, they seemed to have changed the lyrics, though inexpertly. Every time the song lyrics included the word ‘heartbreaker,’ the assembled dancers would simply shout ‘wall’ instead of ‘heart,’ though ‘heart’ could clearly be heard in the music that rang out from the speakers of the vintage 1980’s yellow boom box that was being held up over the head of a man wearing a trench coat. Was that John Cusack? Stella shook her head and refocused on what really mattered. She could see Daggy fluttering in the air near Bieber, attached with a golden chain that fastened his collar to Bieber’s belt loop.
 
These people clearly did not know the power of music. Only Bieber was singing along, and their lyric modifications made the song completely nonsensical (whereas it had only been moderately nonsensical before). For example, the line ‘Don't tell me you're my heartbreaker’, when turned into ‘don’t tell me you’re my wall breaker,’ left something to be desired.  The line ‘girl my wall’s breaking’ was moderately better, and Stella could see the gate into the Hermione Granger Feminist School for Magic begin to shake, and cracks appearing in the surrounding walls. However, the rest of the lyrics of the song, with no reference to walls breaking, had no impact whatsoever, and the walls appeared to be knitting up the cracks and self-repairing.
 
Stella was satisfied that Bieber’s crew would be unable to breach the School’s defences, despite her sabotage. However, she had never studied the magic of dance, and she was completely taken off guard when the dancers’ moves took on a more serious tone. Amidst their shuffle ball changes and pirouettes, they also began to clench their fists and mimic pounding against a wall. As they did so, even though they did not even touch the stones, Stella saw the cracks begin to re-form, deeper than before. 

 Through the gates, she saw a crowd of witches begin to gather in front of the school. They seemed to be gathering their gadgets, and animals, and culinary magic, to defend themselves against the men. But could they stop the gates from being breached? And even if they could keep the men out, the real danger was still coming from the skies. There was no sign of the monkeys but Stella knew they couldn’t be far behind.
 
She began to shout and wave her arms, trying to get the attention of someone, anyone, but the dancers outside the gates, and the witches inside, either didn’t see her or didn’t care. She had to get their attention somehow. Maybe if she could talk to them, explain the danger…
 
Suddenly, she knew what she had to do. She pulled out the knife that Jackie had given her. The gates were beginning to open, just a centimetre now, but they were slowly moving apart. She needed to stop the gates. Despite her lack of gloves, she thrust her bare hands into the snow that was piling up at her feet and formed a snowball around the knife. She would have only one shot.
 
She took aim, and sent the knife-laden snowball flying through the air towards the gates. To her glee, it worked exactly as she had hoped. The snowball smashed against the gates and thudded to the ground, useless. But the music was shut off and the dancing stopped. Bieber looked confused, and a huddle of dancers formed around him as they tried to figure out why someone would throw a snowball at the gates, much less a snowball with an ineffectual knife hidden inside.
 
This was Stella’s chance.
 
“Stop this! There isn’t much time. The flying monkeys are coming, and they want to destroy you both. We need to work together to defeat them.” She projected from her diaphragm, hoping her words would project all the way to the School. The witches there seemed to be paying her no mind, but the same could not be said for the dancers in front of the gates.
 
As one, they all turned to stare at her.
 
Justin Bieber smiled demonically, and Stella’s heart stopped. Never had she seen such evil incarnate. She and been deluded to think that these men would work with the witches against the monkeys. She could see that all her efforts to fix her mistake would fail. The monkeys would win.
 
“I see we’ve got ourselves a hostage,” Bieber spoke quietly, but his words carried in the snow-padded lane. He snapped his fingers and the dancers moved into formation behind him. Stella spared a moment to be relieved that the gates were quietly shutting behind them again, but she only had a moment before Bieber called out the name of the next song: Baby. Daggy continued to fly around Justin’s head but occasionally aimed a kick at Bieber’s head. Would this be enough to distract him?
 
John Cusack fiddled with the boom box and then pressed play. The tinny music blasted out through the antiquated speakers, and the dancers began to move. This time, the crowd shouted out the word ‘hostage’ every time the word ‘Baby’ appeared in the song. (This was a lot of times.)