Bright ideas and rising word counts

The word counter bar for 'Saving' is currently inaccurate. I have written hundreds more words than that, but have been scribbling in a notebook rather than using my laptop over the last couple of weeks, and have yet to transfer it all over. I think I may now have over 20,000 words, but this needs to be independently verified later on by my lovely shiny MacBook. I had got rather stuck before Christmas, and was unsure how to carry on - the 14,000 words I wrote during NaNo were all on track, and I knew in general what was going to happen later on, but I hadn't got the specifics sorted at all. I tried various planning ideas (spreadsheets, mind-mapping, lists) but nothing really felt right. Then it occurred to me that I didn't actually know my characters all that well, and that most of them were really just a vague caricature, without much substance. So I've gone back to the beginning and am writing character studies, some much more detailed than others, but it has really spurred me on, and all the little things I had sort of planned a bit but without really knowing why are coalescing and becoming logical, fitting in with the characters and their pasts. I've also discovered OmniOutliner, which is so useful, flexible and intuitive that I'm beginning to wonder how I ever managed to get anything done without it!