After losing my data the first day of NaNoWriMo (and, again, many thanks to Rammer for offering me 350 of his words to appease my loss!), I got into the habit of saving my manuscript in several locations. Just in case. One of those locations is a text file, which I’ve been running through NaNo’s word count API each time I do a save. But I rarely pay attention to the actual word count.

I know I’m still in the first third of this story, and I’ve come to accept this first draft will be considerably longer than NaNo’s 50,000 word goal. Probably three times as long, actually, which is ok. By the time I edit this draft then send the second draft to a hand-picked group of first readers, then edit it again after receiving their comments… well, I expect one out of every three words to die.

I’m fine with that. Really.

(You can’t see it, but I just took a big swill of my martini to wash away the pain of having said that.)

Still, even I was surprised to find myself over 24,000 words when I did my final manuscript save for the evening. How the hell did that happen? Maybe I’m having more fun than I realized, eh?

UPDATE: Well, lucky me. Just in case I’m not done with the story at 50,000 words, there’s always NaNoFiMo next month. Heh.

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