Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are enjoying your family and friends today. I’m so thankful for so much–family, friends, and an opportunity to keep writing. Check it out! I surpassed 50,000 words on Saturday, November 19!

I am astonished. Shaking my head in utter disbelief. How can this be?

And then I kept going. When I compiled it from Scrivener into Word, it was 202 pages. 202 pages in 19 days. What the heck? (see my word count through yesterday below)

I will have a final summing up next week, but here are some things that I observed over the last week:

• It’s fun to write about an antagonist. Not only do I have an actual antagonist in the book, but he gets to express himself as I jump into his POV sometimes. I’m still working out his character–he’s not all evil, but he’s not completely clear to me yet. He’s surprising me!

• Doubts surface. I realized that in this book is a thriller of sorts. I’ve got a bit of a ticking clock and the stakes for the main character and other characters are high. I had this moment on Saturday when I thought: “I can’t write a book like this! What do I know about mysteries and thrillers?”

• Keep your eye on the prize. Suddenly those doubts pushed me online and I found myself Googling tips for writing thrillers. Very little seemed to vary from advice on how to write a good, compelling novel, except for this diagram, which overlays some thriller-ish traits on the standard three act structure. So I saved that to review later and got off the Internet. “Don’t waste time on this, Denise! Get back to writing.” This was another habit I wanted to break–leaving my writing to go down the rabbit hole of the Internet, where I was often spending an hour or more looking up information that I ended up not needing in my novel. I was proud of myself for getting off quickly.  🙂

Word count as of Wednesday, November 23: 55,064