100 days later.

Remember when I said I’d write every day for 100 days? You might not remember. I kind of buried the commitment at the end of a post. This was at the end of January. Well, lo and behold, it’s 100 days later and I was successful…well mostly. I wrote every day except for FOUR. Two of those days were part of a road trip to Arizona to watch spring training baseball. There was a lot of alcohol involved. The other days were in NYC, visiting my best friend and gallivanting around the city. Again, there was a lot of alcohol involved.

But, aside from that, I wrote every day. Like I said at the beginning of this challenge, not every day involved me in front of the computer for hours at a time. The idea was that I had to write something every day. So even if I just eeked out a sentence, I felt like a success and that feeling motivated me on to the next day. Some days, I was convinced that I didn’t feel like writing at all, but I started and ended up going and going for pages. Other days, I scribbled notes on a post-it and that was it.

Most productive day: About 5000 words

Least productive day: 13 words. Yep. I wrote them on the back of a receipt in a bar.

Total words as of today: 79,214

Daily average over the 100 days: 792

I wrote in the midst of:
-Several weeks of billing 50+ hours a week at work
-A gnarly cold
-Escrow on a new house. Side note: On more than one occasion, I thought about starting a blog called EscrowMakesMeHomicidal.com, but then I realized every post would be the same
-Starting to pack for the move–aahhhh! My mild OCD has been going bananas
-Serious, ongoing family health issues
-Traveling to Vancouver, Seattle, and New York. Turns out plane rides are perfect for editing
-Attempting to maintain a normal social life. This was probably my greatest failure. I’m an introvert so, unfortunately, socializing tends to be the first to go when I’m wrapped up in a novel. Still, there was the spring training trip I mentioned, and wine tasting in Temecula, amongst other fun outings. I tried

All of this just proves that those things I said before–“I’m too busy” and “I’m not inspired” and “I can’t force it”–were 100% excuses. I can force it. And, sometimes, forcing it leads to great writing. Sometimes, it leads to shitty writing, but that’s okay. That’s what editing is for.

So, what now?

Well, thanks to this little 100-day challenge, I’m not that far from being done with the first draft of the novel. I’m estimating it will be about 100,000 words total. I’m going to persist with writing every day until that first draft is done, then begins the self-editing and then the dreaded editing-by-others. Wish me luck!