June 14th – 467,476.

Today I think I just broke my speed record. At 11:25 I checked my word count and realised I needed another 1200 words to hit the target for the day. It is now 11:59, some 34 minutes later and I’ve written 1600 words in that time, and indeed in the last couple of minutes I’ve updated my spreadsheet metronome and opened this document to start work on this blog entry, so more like 32 minutes to write 1600 words. That’s a speed of 3,000 words an hour.

Remember I always say, words written and good words don’t always correlate, and words written on first draft don’t always make it through to the final published version, but I suspect the scene I’ve just written will stay. It highlights a very important stage in the character development for my heroine and I can’t see the book working without it. That is of course, not to say that once the editors get hold of it, it won’t get torn to shreds and rewritten – but that’s an occupation hazard for every scene in every book, hopefully by every author.

So, today’s word count total is 3,217 words, and I’m happy to close in on the 470k mark and it would appear that despite missing 2 days out of the last 20, I’ve actually managed to get close on 60,000 words written since my holiday. Of course in 16 days’ time we’re hitting the half-way point through the year, and thus through this challenge, so I need to get that 32,524 words written to get me past the half-way point of the challenge and at the moment that seems doable.