Day twenty-seven of the writing streak & 75.000 words!
Good and bad habits are so interesting. Or maybe I should call them the habits we want and the ones we don’t. Whatever each of us decides to call them, my thoughts on them are the same.
It can be so hard and require a lot of effort to build good habits, and yet they are so easy to break. And yet bad habits seem to simply appear on their own, and usually require tremendous effort to get rid of…
I say this because, a few weeks ago, I had been doing so well with publishing my daily notes posts, but then something happened and I missed a day. A day in itself isn’t that bad, but somehow that day turned into two, then three, then four, then ten… Somehow, only because one night it had been too late and I had been too tired to write my daily post and decided to postpone it to the next day, I then went on to miss ten full days.
But oh well, I won’t let a small failure bring me down, and that’s why I’m finally back at it again today!
The good news is that, even though I failed to keep up with my daily posts, I did follow through with my daily writing – even if more than a couple of times I did it at the latest possible hour, with heavy eyes and yawns every few minutes. But I did it. I wrote every day since the 25th of July, which brings me to a current total of twenty-seven for my writing streak! This is crazy, especially when I think about the fact that less than a month ago I had never ever passed a full week of writing every day.
And that is not the only good news. The other good news is that at the end of today’s second writing session I reached a total of 75.000 words! I am so amazed by that number. And to think that a month ago I was only at nearly half that total word count.
Something I hadn’t said on this blog yet was that I had set myself the goal of either reaching a total of 80.000 words by the end of the month, or completing my first draft in case that happened at an earlier word count.
The reason why I hadn’t mentioned this goal yet was because, apart from having missed writing half the posts of this month, I had also been afraid that my goal had been too ambitious and that I would fail, and I didn’t have the courage to publicly set a goal that I wouldn’t be able to reach. But it’s been at least a week already that I believe I will be able to reach my goal, and now, instead of scaring me, it excites me!
Throughout this month of August I have consistently been writing about 5.000 words per week: on Wednesday the 5th I reached 60.000 words, on Sunday the 9th I reached 65.000 words, on Friday the 14th I reached 70.000 words, and today I reached 75.000 words. This means that I only have 5.000 words to go before reaching my goal, and if I keep up with my current pace, I’ll reach it before the end of next week. Although in all honesty I’m not even sure if I will reach a total of 80.000 words because I really feel like I am reaching a natural ending for my novel. In fact, today I feel like I wrote the end already, and that I’m only missing a small section right before that, and since I don’t know how long that section is going to be exactly, I wonder which of my two goals I will reach first – reaching 80.000 words or completing the first draft.
I know I’ve said this a few times in this post already, but I’m really very excited! I went through so many ups and downs whilst writing this book, even in the last days, but now I’m reaching a point where I am about to finish the full first draft of my novel. And no matter how messy that first draft is, that will be my biggest milestone yet!