Nocturnal obsession?

Okay, it's now after 4 AM and I'm slightly -- just slightly -- further ahead on this 3-Day-Novel Contest game plan.

First, I timed myself for six minutes to see how many words I could write straight out of my head. Three hundred and eighty-nine. Multiply it by ten, and you get 3890 words per hour. Slice some off for "time to think", and 3000 words per hour times 45 hours writing, and you get 135,000 words. Or, in other words, a decent-sized novel.

But the FAQ on the 3-Day-Novel-Contest site says that the average submission is about 100 pages, so when I crunched a few more numbers, I figured that to be around 25,000-30,000 words. To verify this, I went back through the 2004 and 2005 forums, and that does seem like an average submission.

So, using a 28,000 word count as my guide, I have a plan that goes as follows: a prologue of 1000 words, followed by twelve chapters of about 2200 words each, and then a 1000-word epilogue.

Now if I had the slightest clue what any of those 28,000 words might happen to be, I'd feel much better about this whole thing. :)

I really, REALLY should go to bed.