I did it. 50,000 words (well, 50,303, if you want to be precise about it) in 28 days. I am officially a Novelist, at least according to the NaNoWriMo folks. It wasn't pretty toward the end--I concluded the novel a few hours ago, but it was only 48,000 words long, so I've been scramling for those last 2,000 for a while.
There is also the fact that the vast majority of what I've written is total crap that will have to be discarded, or at least substantially rewritten, before I am willing to let anyone--and that includes my husband, who knows the risks he incurs by mocking me--read it. The chunks of it are completely out of order. The prologue doesn't fit with what happens at the end.
But I'm taking comfort in what one of the real (i.e., published) novelists said in one of the e-mail pep talks that got sent out: Writing the first draft of a novel is like carving a huge hunk of granite out of a quarry wall. It's only the first step--you still have to shape the huge block of stone into a sculpture. That's what revising and editing are for.
Next month.