fun with word counts

Cold and rainy day up here, so we called off the house work. (London's house is unheated and he had the electricity turned off, so a wet, cold, dim grey day is not good for cleaning.)

Instead, I did laundry, rearranged part of the kitchen, started soaking the wax out of my carpet with boiling water (that's a very slow process!), tested a hairdryer I'd salvaged from London's trash (it turned out to be broken *sigh*), and wrote a little. 250 words of "Secrets" and 300 words for NaNo. That brings my NaNo total to 5,550.

Out of mild curiosity, I checked the current word count on "Secrets". The 7 posted chapters come to 70,000 words, and the current (unfinished) chapter brings it to about 78,000. Given that I estimate the story to be 14 chapters long, that would mean I'm writing a 140-150 thousand word fanfiction novel.

So I know I can write long stuff, which is good since my NaNo novel is definitely on the long and involved side. The trick is to write quickly, and that I'm not so good at. Heck, it's taken me two and a half years to get this far on "Secrets"! Now, granted I had school and jobs and other stories to deal with during that period, but that's still pretty pathetic. It's not even 30,000 words per year!