I reached 50,000 words around 9:30 Thanksgiving evening, but was unable to officially validate it until this morning.

This year provided a unique challenge in that I wrote nearly all of my novel on the computer, instead of on the Palm V. This allowed for a number of opportunities previously unavailable to me, like:

• spellchecking
• surfing the net for research purposes
• surfing the net for procrastination purposes
• referring to previous chapters of the story to check for consistency
• knowing my exact word count as I typed

By Day 8 or 9, I was looking for a way to combat these opportunities. That's when I found a word processor called Writeroom, which essentially re-creates the simple writing environment of my PDA on my iMac.

It's a nifty little program and I'm actually using it right now to type this entry. It helps keep the distractions away. By the way, one of my resolutions for the coming year will be to increase my resistance to distractions.

As I've done in previous years, here are some of this year's NaNoWriMo statistics. Last year's statistics are shown in parentheses:

Words written: 50,272 (50,165)
Hours of writing: 40.75 (34.75)
Highest one-day count: 3,918 (3,906)
Lowest one-day count: 0 (0)
Percent of novel written on my PDA: 0 (67)
Least productive day of the week: Friday (Monday)
Number of writing days: 22 (23)
Number of zero-word days: 1 (4)
Cups of coffee consumed (above "normal"): 7 (27)
Pounds of Skittles eaten: 0.25 (0.35)

For those still writing steadily towards the finish line... Good job so far! Keep up the good work! Remember to stretch before and after every intense typing session and stay hydrated. The last thing you want is to get into a good groove and suddenly cramp up.