Word count - Day 26

48,081 words down, 1,919 words to go.

With 9900 words written over the course of Fri, Sat and Sun night the word count had a significant jump this weekend. I attribute a lot of this to a concept called 'word wars' started by a few other people working on nanowrimo. Simply put, people log into an IRC channel to talk about their writing, offer each other support etc. Normally this would just be a distraction against actual writing, however, the word wars run for 20mins every half hour.

In the 20mins allotted everyone writes as much as they can. At the end of the 20mins everyone compares their word count for that period of time. There are no accolades for getting the highest number or recriminations for the lowest, it’s just an extra incentive to write solidly for 20min blocks at a time. On average I was hitting between 600-800 words in a twenty minute 'war' so the numbers add up pretty quickly (there were people producing over 1000 words in the same timeframe which was impressive to see).

I've said a couple of times that the story I'm writing doesn't really work and will be no where near finished at 50K words. At the moment I’m working towards a cliff-hanger type ending somewhere around the 50K mark (though it will probably be closer to 60K) and I’ll keep writing for the rest of the week. I think there's a good story in amongst pages of inconsistencies and forced sentences but it may take a little time to weed it out. At the moment December is gong to be a rest month, though I have a couple of ideas (including one that I hope to turn into a comic script submission) so may spend the time working on plots.

Tonight's target is the magical 50K mark. Assuming no natural disasters and that I remain conscious long enough after getting home, this should be eminently doable.