I’ve been doing my word counting inconsistently. At first I put each day’s output in a separate file, then added the days’ totals up as I went along. But I have also been keeping one continuous document of every day’s output sequentially. Sometimes I have drawn from that for my word counting.

Most recently I’ve been adding a single day’s numbers to my running total, NOT using the continuous document. Just for the heck of it, I decided to paste everything I’ve written so far into the continuous document and check the word count of that.

I thought I had written 36296.

Open Office’s word counter says 38156.

Word’s word counter says 37719.

NaNo’s official word counter says 37716. Amusingly enough, the NaNo Web site says that the official word counter errs on the generous side.

Anyway, going with NaNo’s conservative estimate, I’ve written 1420 more words than I originally calculated. That brings me effortlessly to 37716/50000, or 75.4% complete.

Let me repeat that so that you can grasp the import of this. I’m over 3/4 of the way done [with the NaNo word count — not addressing the entire novel here]! I’m also ahead of schedule because I have 8 writing days (11/23, 11/24, 11/25, 11/26, 11/27, 11/28, 11/29, 11/30) left, or over 1/4 of the time.

I’m not going to write any more tonight because I really don’t have any motivation. I had to force myself to do job-related work and NaNo-related work today. I have lost much of my concentration due to the excitement and interruption of a day off which is kind of in the middle of the week. I will therefore rest my brain until tomorrow, when I may have more energy to tackle challenging and climactic scenes.

Have a happy T-giving, if you celebrate it.