Word Count/Page count update and other randomness...

So, I started a new project a few days ago.  And, I already have 5,000 words of it done.  One reason it is coming so easy is that I have been working on this thing for a long time.  And, I think I have even taken the J.R.R. Tolkien approach to writing.  It has been written that he started the LotR novel--

(Yes novel, it was suppose to be one long book and not broken up into sections.  That is one reason why many find Two Towers and Return so hard to get into, the novel was chopped up by Ballentine because they thought no American reader would read a thousand page book about elves.  Oh well...)

--about four or five times.  And, each time he felt like he couldn't go forward any more, he scrapped the whole thing and started fresh.  Many writers I know would say this is insanity and would scream at Papa Tolkien and say, "You can re-write it man!  Just keep going forward.  Or revise, don't scrap it."  Yet, he was a linguist and not a creative writer.

Where am I going with this?  Well, I have been working on this for years and years.  For a long time, I just wrote and wrote and then re-wrote and re-wrote.  Yet, there came a time when I couldn't anymore.  I went on to other things, yet this story was in the back of my mind.  I also let some people read it and when I got their feedback, it helped.  Yet, I still felt like there was something missing.

So, I let it sit on the back burner and went to grad school.  Worked on a completely different novel and that one is now in a contest.  And, I feel that after having gotten into steampunk, I realized that was missing from the story.  So, I started again, last year.  And I got maybe fifty pages in and it stopped flowing.  So, I tried to revise and re-write.  Nothing.

And I shelved it and moved on to other things again.  Now, it burst back into my head while I stared at the blank page of my computer screen.  And, for the past few days I've been riding that wave.  I know that the dreaded fifty page mark is coming in...and with the way things are going, I might reach it soon.  The fifty page mark is something I learned in a writing class.  If you can get a novel to fifty pages, then you have something that can sustain itself.  I know it can sustain itself, I am simply hoping it will continue on past those fifty pages, even though I know what is suppose to happen in the story.

Only time will tell.