word count

I'm becoming a bit obsessed with it on the book I'm currently writing. It's not what I've written, or how much, at the moment it's all about how many words. (30,000 if you were wondering, I like to round up.) There's just something so satisfying about seeing the word count slowly getting bigger, even if I am only half way though, even if I know all 30,000 words will need to be edited. Maybe it's because I'm only really writing in my evenings and a spare hour here and there so it's a way of nibbling away at the idea in my head in bite sized chunks. Or maybe it just reminds me of my student days when a word count was everything, when it would be the thing you talked about with your housemates, when it would set off internal debates about squeezing in a few extra words with some clever punctuation. The truth of it is I never had a problem hitting the word count, my challenge was always sticking to it. I tend to write 'long' and then have to tirelessly edit which is how I know I've still got another 30,000 words or so in me yet. If I can find some time to type them out of course.