Day thirty-two of the writing streak & 80.000 words!
I did it! I reached 80.000 words today! Yuhuuu!!
This was the goal I had set for myself for this month, and I’m super proud of myself for reaching it. I also feel a little bit astonished to have reached this point because, for me, this word count is the one that I associate with what is necessary for a real book. I know that the actual word count of books varies depending on the genre and the intended reader, but putting all that aside, 80.000 is the amount of words I always pictured my book would need in order to finally really be considered a book. And now I reached it, meaning that I finally feel like I actually did write a book. A messy, chaotic, and unpresentable book, but a book nevertheless. And anyway, I’m trying hard to remind myself that I shouldn’t worry about this first draft being “bad”, that it’s ok for it to be messy and ugly, and that its only purpose right now is to exist. The “looking good” part is for the next drafts.
Talking about next drafts, reaching 80.000 words was one of the two possible options I’d set myself for accomplishing my goal of the month. The other possible option had been to finish the first draft of my manuscript – in case that happened before reaching my word goal. Either would have counted as a success if achieved before the end of August.
These past few days I felt so close to the end that I really thought I would finish the draft before reaching my big word count milestone, but obviously I was wrong. The reason for that is because I realized that my manuscript is still missing something important. It’s not the actual plot of the story, but an important subplot that I’ve been postponing to work on for a while. Now that everything else is “done”, I can’t postpone it anymore, meaning that I have to focus on it now, and hopefully figure it out soon so that I can move on to the next draft.
The good news is that today I was already able to start working on the general direction of it, which I hope will be helpful for me when I really get to work on it tomorrow.