I got to 5000 words written last week. I’m extremely excited about it. It feels like a huge milestone for me. My goal when I started the book was to have a rough draft of at least 50k words for my novel before considering it a “finished” work, which means I’ve written 10% of it by now.
I started writing officially on December 17/2019. So it took me around two months to get to this point. In all fairness, I went on vacation on December 21 for over 2 weeks and at the start of February my grandmother died and I spent over a week not writing or working. So in actual, real-time, I wrote those words in around a month.
It’s still not the fastest rate, but that doesn’t worry me because I’ve always known I’m not a fast writer. I’ve also only been dedicating an hour or so each day to writing the book.
I wish I could do more, but work is always in the way. Although I also wonder if maybe this limit I have each day has helped me not burn out. If I spent all day writing maybe I would run out of ideas and hit a block. Instead, every day I come eager to use the limited time I have to it’s fullest potential.
Sometimes I will end with barely 100 words a day, others closer to 500 or more. Recently I’ve had more and more 500+ word days, which is filling me with excitement. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, because there is always the possibility of hitting a block at some point, but right now I’m feeling great. And I feel like my goal is reachable. It’s not a question of if, just when.
Another reason why this is an important milestone for me is because I’ve never written long stories. I usually limit myself to one-shots around the 2k mark. I’ve had a couple of 5k works. And my longest work ever was around 12k. Knowing that I have 5k words down, but also that I still have so many ideas and things planned for what is left, fills me with confidence I will have enough to do a full-length novel.
In conclusion, I’m really happy and excited, and I wanted to share that with you guys.