It's not really an obsession I would say, but more of a, "Hey, I'm closer to my goal" since each genre has a preferred length, whether it's 40,000 words or 125,000. So it's merely a, 'Woohoo, it's coming along!'--That's not to say the quality is fantastic, those things may be edited or deleted later, but we're working towards out goal. If a painter had 100 feet of canvas to paint then 20 feet is an accomplishment. I guess you could say the thread is more about inspiring others to get to work, stop being distracted, crank out that first draft and also a feel-good place for people to share what they accomplished in a day. I could be a housewife and say I deep-cleaned the entire downstairs and only had the upstairs left to go; that might be an accomplishment to me that I would like to share. Everyone's goals will be different; the thread isn't about competing word counts but to encourage, uplift and inspire. If you wrote, 5,000 words and are happy with it then that's awesome. If you only wrote 500 but feel like you did well then that's awesome, too.
I'm not writing today. Yesterday was a sluggish day. I only got 493 words down. I probably wrote more than that, but they ended up getting deleted. I'm content with where I left off, though.
