Word count: 50,231!

nano_08_winner_largeHooray! I made it to 50,000 words, and one day ahead of schedule! For all the things that have been going on this month – trips to Sydney, watching Ironman competitions, working on weekends, etc, etc – I’m surprised that I made it there at all.

So I’ve become an official NaNoWriMo winner for 2008. Once you hit 50,000 words, there’s a facility on the NaNoWriMo website to paste in the text content of your novel, and they will do an official verification of your word count. Interestingly, the count the website gives you is slightly higher than what you see in MS Word. At the moment, my official word count on NaNoWriMo is 50,497. It’s nice that it’s a little higher that MS Word, instead of lower.

So is that it? No, most definitely not. I’m heading out to dinner tonight, and maybe I’ll do a little bit more later. But I will definitely do some more tomorrow. I have no intention of trying to beat the 60,000+ I did last year, not at this late stage. But last year, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have all the commitments that I did this year, so I’m still very proud of my effort.

One more day to go, and I’ll see if I can’t do another couple of thousand words before the official end of NaNoWriMo…