By the time I boarded the plane for Minneapolis and the 2008 American Christian Fiction Writers Conference, I had been writing for eight frustrating years. My writing came in spurts--I’d start my novel, the words pouring out of me and I’d think, ‘this is wonderful. I’m going to do this!’ Then I hit a brick wall. The words would dry up faster than a mud puddle on a summer day. I was within days giving up on my dreams of getting published. And then I learned about daily word counts. Keep track of daily word counts! I know, I know--how could I have been writing for THAT long and not known something as simple as daily word counts. Well, maybe I did. What writer hasn’t heard the whole ‘put your backside in a chair and write’ speak at one time or another? And isn’t that what NaNoWrites is all about, putting your story down on paper? But setting a daily word count not only gave me a goal(which is H...