The final days of Nano draw to a close, and I'm spectacularly behind. I've even forgotten to update the Nano counter on the page (though a quick glance reveals I was only remembering to do that once a week anyway.) As so often happens (in November especially, it seems) life intervened. But that's okay - as I said last week, focus on what you have achieved. I have an extra seventeen thousand words that otherwise I mayn't have written for several more months, a good notion for where the novel is actually going, and I enjoyed feeling part of the community of people who were attempting this. The many tweets from Nano-ites all over the world were great to read - this was the first year I'd tried Nano as a tweeter.

Congratulations to those of you (I've heard there are quite a few) who made it over the line, and equal congratulations to those who didn't - you still wrote something that you mightn't have otherwise, and that is, after all, the whole point.

A quick review of Nano's wordcount scoreboard puts Melbourne at #19, with a total of  20 million words, well ahead of many US and European cities (and countries!) with a much greater population than ours. Not that it's a competition. But hah! Fantasy has also clocked 471 million, more than twice the wordage of the next highest genres (Young Adult, at 227 million, with SciFi not far behind at 210 million).

Of course, for a lot of the world there's still 48 hours to go, so rankings may change, but I feel a certain pride that my city and genre are so highly represented amongst people writing an arbitrary number of words to see if they can.