50k and Counting

I've hit the 50k mark! Hurray! I feel tingly, and I'm smiling like a pirate who just stumbled upon loads and loads of treasure.

I always thought 50k words was impossible. Well, not impossible; that would be an exaggeration. Maybe hard to reach or a gruesome crawl. I thought that writing 50k words would take six months or more. Nope. It took two months and two weeks to reach this goalpost.

Now, a few things I had picked up along the way.

Free writing--

This one's an amazing writing tool. Before, I only used free writing to get me out of writer's block in the middle of a writing session.

Now, I use free writing before I start my writing session. It gets my creative juices going, and it also breaks down my 'inner editor.' Even though I'm on the 2nd draft, I'm rewriting everything, which means I need to bring my 'inner creator' out rather than my 'inner editor.'

For those who don't know what free writing is, it's a writing exercise where just write down everything inside your head. It's stream of consciousness. While you are free writing, you are forbidden to hit the backspace and correct any typos. You just go on and on and on.

However, you need to set a time limit. Ten minutes is the max, and anything more than that is procrastination. Most of the time, I don't use all ten minutes. Usually I end my free writing exercise at the five minute mark.

The novel is moving pretty good, and I'm estimating that the word count could be around 100k. I'll probably do another blogpost when I reach 75k. Until then, I have to write the adventures and heartbreaks of my two protagonists.