4755 words

That's a lot of words, or very few words, depending on your perspective. It's very few words for a novel, or some long piece of academic writing like, say, a dissertation. It's even only about 1/7th of my master's thesis.

But it's longer than a conference paper, and about the length of some seminar papers I've written. It's also really long for a blog post.

I'm pretty happy with the number though. That's how many words I've written for Nanowrimo, which is right on track for getting to 50,000 words by the end of the month. Actually, it's even a bit ahead of the game, which is good, because I can anticipate a certain level of reluctance creeping in as the month goes on. Thirty days solid of that kind of writing production is pretty intense, even if it's really rough writing. And it is. I'm not thinking about which word to use, or how to phrase something as much as I 'm just concentrating on getting the ideas onto the paper.

I'm having fun - so far - and it's kinda cool to think that if I can keep this up, I might just have an interesting story by the end of it.

But that's a long way off, and there are a lot of things that could derail me before that point. One day at a time is all I can count on. I've done things that way before - one day at a time - sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always in the end, feeling like it was worth the effort. So here I go again, with something else this time. One. day. at. a. time.