Today being my 30th birthday I decided to do a little something to commemorate a new chapter in my life. So beginning tomorrow I’m going to try a little personal word count challenge. I’m sure there are other authors out there who have done things a bit more extreme, but for me I’m expecting this task to be quite monumental.
I will be challenging myself to write 10K words per day for the next week or thereabouts. I have a bit of a getaway planned in the middle of next week, and want to bang out the majority of a 90K novel I’ve been rolling around in my head before then. This is going to take quite a bit of perseverance on my part, as I don’t have the novel fully outlined, and there are still some major plot points I’m going back and forth on internally, but I think that I can still achieve my goal. One thing I realized over the last week was that when put to the test, I can crank the words out.
I’m sure the end product will require quite a bit of editing and proofing, but to say that I wrote a novel in a week will be very satisfying to me. Maybe someone will even show interest in it.
So to begin, here’s a screenshot of my Write or Die statistics page as of today, 3/4/12, my 30th birthday. Time to crank those numbers out!
Also I wanted to add a little something I wrote the first time I demo’d WoD last week. I basically set it for 5 minutes, no minimum word count, and banged out the following. I haven’t edited since then, so what you see is what I wrote. 5 minutes, no prompt, no pre-thought, no nothing. Just began writing.
I was standing in a bar, holding my favorite drink. I took sips from it, I didn’t really have much going on. Just killing time. A girl at the end of the bar caught my eye, and apparently I had caught hers too. She stood there watching me for a second; she didn’t look away when we made eye contact. Her hair was long, blonde, and she had a thin frame. She intrigued me.
“Haven’t seen you around these parts,” I said to her. She eyed the drink in my hand before responding.
“Scotch?” she asked. The question caught me off guard.
“That’s all I drink.”
“That’s not what my dossier says,” she responded in an even tone. Her face was mute as she looked at me.
“Dossier? On me?”
She nodded.
“Are you some kind of private investigator?” I asked, not sure where this conversation was going.
“I’m supposed to kill you,” she responded.
There was no hint of sarcasm in her voice, no sign of any emotion at all in fact. She had stated it simply and clearly, as though she were commenting on the weather.
“Supposed to?” I asked. “Does that mean you’re not going to?”
“That depends on how you respond to one question.”
“What’s the question?” I asked.
“Am I beautiful?”
I stared at her for a shocked moment. Of course she was.
“Yes,” I responded.
She pulled a revolver from behind the counter.
“Would a beautiful girl do this?”
I’ll be sure to update periodically with my word count. I’ll try to make a point of updating every day even if only to post an updated screenshot of my statistics 
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