I’m now at 40,059 words for NaNoWriMo. It’s not even 4:30 yet, so I’ll be able to get some more writing in later this evening. I’ve discovered that I write fairly well if I do a 2 hours on, 1 hour off schedule. And the hour off can be writing something else too (for instance, blogging here). It just has to be me not thinking about Memorial Stone.

Anyway, now that I am under 10,000 words left, I can see victory approaching :-) And the other good news is that when I get back to the story, I’ll be doing the last part of the opening act of the book. Yup, the entire first act will be finished.

I should note that I’ve written stuff from the other acts already too, so the first act is not 40,000 words by itself. It’ll probably only be around 35,000 words once I’m finished with it. And the story is breaking into the typical three acts. It’ll be fun to finally finish it.

By the way, even if I hit 50,000 tonight (not sure if I’ll try for it yet), I’m not going to quit for November. I want to finish the novel, not just get to 50,000 words, this month. So if you were praying that I’d hit the 50,000 mark and then shut up for the rest of the month…well, you got another thing comin’ :-)

UPDATE: It’s now just past 6:20 and I’m up to 43,061 words now. That brings today’s writing output to a total of 6,829 words. By the way, Act I is also now complete. My estimate was fairly close: it’s 34,112 words long. Almost all of the extra 10,000 words I’ve written have been for the second act. The third act is going to be the most difficult for me to write (for many reasons, not just plot reasons). Anyway, if all the acts end up being similar length then I’ll have over 100,000 words for this project. I don’t know if that’ll be the case or not, but the story arcs I’ve got in mind would make the last act longer than the first act. If I write everything out, I have a shot for this being my longest novel to date. If I burn out on it, I might go for the abridged version :-P

UPDATE 2: Okay, it’s now bedtime. But the final update for today is 44,896 words done. That leaves me with 5,104 words to do in the next few days after I did 8,664 words today. I’ll almost certainly get my 50,000 before the 15th, which puts me more than double the rate I need to be. (Actually, to be on pace today everyone needed to hit 20,000 words, which would be 40,000 if you’re shooting for 100,000 total. Since I’m at almost 45,000 I’m well ahead of where I need to be for that goal too.)