My friend Catie, along with several other writers of her acquaintance, runs a lovely, lovely thing: a chat room where they simply hang out with each other and do what they call “word wars”. The idea is that all participants, rather than actually chatting with each other, do half-hour chunks in which they write like mad and then check in when the half-hour is done to see how far they’ve gotten to their stated goals.

I decided to try this out for the first time today, and ye gods this was crazy effective. I’d decided to try to hit my historical usual daily goal of 500 words, but after three rounds of word wars I’d actually topped 800. After that, the other participants dropped out of the chat room. I was feeling on top of the world, though, and ambitious enough to keep going. Screw 500 words, I thought. Let’s aim for end of a chapter.

And it worked. Ye gods, it worked. I have written 1,592 words total for today, ladies and gentlemen. Chapter 1 of Mirror’s Gate is now complete. And Yevanya has now laid eyes on the man who looks very disturbingly like her husband Aleksandr–only Aleksandr is supposed to be dead! Dun dun dun!

Clearly, I am going to have to participate in the word wars more often if this is what it takes to kick my muse back into this kind of gear. Those of you out there who are also writers, I highly recommend this for encouraging your compatriots to work along with you!