10,000 words!

Yippee! I'm so excited - last night/ early this morning I hit the 10,000 word mark in the novel. Not only that, I finished the first part of three, so I'm well on my way. With 40,000 words to go, and about 2,500 words per chapter, that's another 16 chapters. I'm going to sit down later and sketch out exactly what's going to happen during those remaining chapters. I like to plan out so that I know what's going to happen when and not leave some things hanging.

I was worried for awhile that I was becoming too focused on the word count rather than the quality of the work that I was producing. But now I can see that it's a goal for me to beef up what I've written. Take last night's work for example. I had a chapter to write in which I knew exactly what was going to happen. I also figured that I should keep to the 2,500 word-per-chapter length, which is what the other chapters have ended up at. But when I got what I wanted written, I was short about 700 words. So, I went back and read and thought to myself, what can I add here? How can I describe this more accurately? And before I knew it - bam! Another 1,000 words without even thinking about it. Wahoo!

Wow. That was so interesting. Sorry. I just woke up. Never blog on an empty stomach.

So now I get to fly my character to a popular American tourist destination, where the majority of the novel will take place. Since I've only been to this place once, I hope that I will be able to remember enough to use it as a backdrop for my little story. Of course, I'll have to make up a bunch of it - I'm not sure how to hotel names and tourist locations without stepping on toes. I guess since this story is for my own pleasure I won't have to worry about it much.