Word warring and winning

It's amazing how motivating a good old-fashioned word war contest between two friends can be!  I convinced a friend of mine — a published author, John Beachem — to do NaNoWriMo this year, and at first I was amused that my word count stayed consistently pretty far ahead of his.  This was partly because I started the month with flying colors, and partly because he spent time rewriting what he'd already written about a week in.





He started catching up with me around when my daily pace started flagging, and that made me nervous enough to jump start my writing drive again.  Last night, I got to 50k before he did, though he was only 500 words away when he quit for the night, so he easily could have beaten me if he'd kept going!  Not that I'm complaining...

It feels good to be a winner!

I stopped last night with 51,119 NaNo words (75,119 total words in the novel), for a total of 2,562 words written yesterday evening.  I think I probably have a few thousand words left to write before the novel is finished, plus I need to go back and fill in a scene I skipped, which will probably be another couple thousand words.  In other words, I should be a little over 80k by the time I'm done with the first draft, which will hopefully be in another couple of days!