hi everyone. congratulations to tuar caetha and hairy woman and everyone else who wrote at all, and especially those who finished.
i nearly didn't. on day 29 i discovered that my real on-the-page word count was about 3000 wrds short of the amount shown on the nanowrimo page. i think i accidentally deleted about that much earlier on. what it meant was that i had to sit up late and type flat out, and what happened was that i hit the 'flow' state and did some of my smoothest, most fluent and readable work ever. i remember this from my hand-writing days - speed and flow go hand in hand to some extent. write fast, edit slow seems to be the message.
the last week was unreal for me. we had 45 degree heat with me wetting down chook scratches and goat yards every half hour during the worst of it, and in the midst of it chicks hatching, two attacks on them by a deadly two-meter long venomous king brown snake that killed two of my brave bantam hens trying to defend their chicks. may kind fauns see them across that rainbow bridge. my laptop kept overheating and with high sunspot activity, my wireless connection, which is marginal anyway, this far from civilisation, (all of 8 miles out of town) kept flickering out at inconvenient times. i really nearly gave up.
i didn't get to the adelaide celebratory pizza-frenzy, but i raised a golden goblet with them in spirit!
sláinte
It's good to hear all of your ideas and they sound like there's a lot of promise to come! At the last minute I settled on Paranormal/Supernatural, because I like frights! It's like you say, Tuar_Ceatha: if someone asked me to tell them a story, it would be a spooky one, er, which would probably wake them up instead of help them to sleep. 
It's proving very difficult to pace properly though without being too dull or revealing too much too soon. I might blog mine when I'm done, but I'm not convinced I love it enough yet. How are you all keeping on target for word counts? And where are you getting your best work done this year? Like last year, the coffee shops seem the most inspirational (read: the least distracting) for me.
nice to see you again!