I discovered this little webpage:

http://www.felgall.com/jstip42.htm

Allow scripts on it if you use NoScript. It automatically counts your words as you type. Nothing is more motivating to hitting 1666 than seeing the number go up as you type! I hit 1829 today because I wanted to end at a good spot.

Once you're done, just copypasta over to Word.

MS Word 2007 also does this, for those who have it. I don't know about 2003 or OpenOffice, though I can't see why OpenOffice wouldn't, since it doesn't sound technically challenging.

I love that everyone is talking about word counts, and not any of the other intricacies of writing.

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

H1N1 flu has sidelined me so I'm still at 1K words. Sick panda is sad.

10,701 words as of this afternoon. (Okay, I cheated, a little under half of that was written beforehand, and isn't counting toward the 50K.)