What does it mean, "winner?"

I've often thought, and said, that the thing I didn't like about NaNoWriMo is the idea that it somehow produces "winners." It's a challenge, sure, but writing is a process. It's about creating the motivation to write every day, knowing that it may not -- well, definitely isn't, in my case -- a polished, perfect anything. But I took it on because I'd gotten myself trapped into an editing frame of mind, where I was constantly thinking and overthinking and over, over thinking everything. Sometimes you've got to just write and see what happens.

So I signed up, with just a vague idea of what I would write, the main character only briefly sketched out. And now, according to the NaNo rules, I've "won." A touch over 55,300 words and a finished -- really, really, really rough -- first draft.

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