Thank god its Friday - reward time!

I'm pleased it's Friday because it's one day closer to the weekend when I can just give myself over to my story and my writing, become totally immersed and lose myself with my characters.

I've been setting a cracking pace so far but have slumped off the last few nights and days (daytime because I've been working the real job) - and nights because I've passed the fabulous sex and hit the heartache and that's confronting!

There are other fabulous writers in our group who have been sprinting hard, juggling housework, kidlets and jobs and still produced amazing word counts. If you're not one of these writers, then don't despair - the challenge is not yet over, and any word count is better than sitting on your butt and watching Australia's Got Talent.

I won't admit to juggling housework - with the man away, I've been ignoring all but the necessities (sometimes I even ignored the fact that I had to eat), which means that this weekend I will have to alternate between word sprints and housework because he's back on Monday night.

Now that we're almost halfway through the month, I want you to reward yourself for getting this far, no matter what your word count is. One of the reasons I haven't written tonight is that I did just that: my reward was an iTunes card (Big W are selling $50 cards for $30) and a shopping spree on iTunes. So I got myself 3 albums plus a few individual songs: a grand total of 47 songs. Ian Moss is serenading me right now.

I also bought a new Cyndi Lauper song called Same Old Story (although when she sings it, it has an extra adjective in there). I really hope that I'm not writing the same old story with my 50k effort but actually I don't believe I am. Instead of drawing events from my life in isolation and sticking them in a story, I've stolen the whole story and plot line from my life. The names and places have been changed to protect the guilty and I've added some extra characters. In a couple of days, I've going to blog about Helga (who appears as a character in my novel called The Harriet Chariot). Helga was my first car, a powder blue 1966 Volkswagon beetle, and she and I had lots of pizza delivery adventures together. That post will appear on Write on Track some time after the weekend, right after I've scanned her picture out of my 1986 diary. (Yeah, I loved my car - she was my ticket to independence)

So fellow writers, tell me how you are going to reward yourself for getting this far in 50ks and don't forget to post your total word count by 8pm on Sunday night so I can update your word meters.