Anyone watching?

In case the answer to that is yes, here is an update. I have reached 70K words on the first draft of my first novel. It has been in the making for a few years now (of actual writing) and a few years prior to that where the idea was growing in my mind. Yeah, it's been a long process, that disappoints me. I have learned some things along the way, with many more learning's likely to come. I thought I would mention a few, once I am done with the book I will likely revisit this topic and do it a more verbose treatment. At 70K words that puts me about 60% done (I suspect since you never exactly know until you get to the end). Things I have learned are as follows: the biggest battle is consistency - writing every day, getting words on the page, it's rough and it's the first battle you must win if you ever want to really be a writer; it's a battle that is still underway for me but I can finally feel the momentum turning in my direction, I am writing about 400-600 words nearly every weekday, I feel that I need to get that number to 1000 which is where most professional writers are (from the anecdotal evidence I have gathered from reading their blogs and listening to their pod-casts.) There are 3 4 phases to the entire effort as I see it, 1) creating the idea 2) writing 3) re-writing 4) publishing and promotion. For me, #1 is a lot of fun and consists of a lot of thinking and scratching down outlines, world building, and other miscellaneous stuff that comes to mind to feed richness into 'The Idea.' #2 is work, lots of work, and for me only a little fun, but mostly work - it's work i enjoy so don't misunderstand, but its work getting all that #1 stuff into real words that maintain some consistency, many of these words are not the right ones, you know it as soon as you put it on the page, I know that 60-80% of what I have put down in this first draft will be re-written. #3 is a lot of fun, its when you take a sentence that isn't much more than black and white on a page and turn it into a rainbow of color that really satisfies the reader and rewards them for the wager they made when picking up your book. I did however make the mistake of starting on re-writing before i was done with the first draft, i have since realized, and read that this is a big no-no, i allowed myself to get side tracked and lost many months re-writing the first 30K words, do this and you risk never finishing your book, and the edits you make may be the wrong ones because you don't know how your story turns out yet - this is true in my case, one of the significant edits i made i will be undoing because as my characters have experienced more, i get to know them better, and so forth... #4 remains to be seen... I am toying with the idea of using my FB status to only report my word count and use that to self motivate - if the world (at least the portion that i know) sees my word count regularly and knows if it doesn't increment in a meaning manner then i would feel like a slacker, so it might be a good way to push me to be consistent and get words on the page. anyway... that's the scoop...