It’s incredible the contrast between my last update and this one. Then I came to you sharing how I had found it almost impossible to write anything for over two months. Now I come to tell you that after two weeks of dedicated work and focus, I’ve gotten to another landmark on my work. My first draft is now 30K words. Yes, 30.000 words.
I owe it to the #1000wordsofsummer challenge. It gave me the motivation to start, to push myself every day, so I didn’t fail myself and my own goals. Now the challenge it’s over, but I plan on going back and reading their motivational e-mails to keep trying to write those 1000 words a day.
I feel energized in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I’m no longer afraid of the empty page. Not even on days when it’s harder to find the energy or creativity to write and get that word count going.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned during these two weeks, is to keep pushing, keep going, keep trying. Some days I had my 1000 words ready by 8:00 a.m. Others, it was 10:00 p.m. and I was still struggling, but I didn’t give up. That’s my biggest and most important lesson.
I’m also really excited about getting to that 30K mark. In theory, that means I’ve written 50% of my book. When I started this project, and after some research, I established 60K words as the minimum length my book should have.
It’s not a rigid goal, I will go with what feels best for the story and that allows me to explore it in the way I want to. But I want it to be minimum around that number. I have a feeling it will be more.
In practice, I’m about 1/3 done. I still feel like I’m only starting to develop Dani and Ari’s story. And I’m sure I will pass that number. But it still feels nice to see how the initial idea comes to life and it’s becoming more developed.
I’m taking a short break, and after a couple days I will go back to focus as much as I can on writing. Here’s hoping the next update I bring you positive updates again.