This past weekend, I cashed in some of my words that I’d gotten ahead on with the current project. As you know by now, this summer I’m attempting to write an 80,000 word first draft of a novel in eighty days. That’s 1,000 words per day. For the last few weeks, I’ve been running 5 or 6K ahead of my word goal.

Today is Day 40, and I actually reached 43,000 this morning. I’m still 3 days ahead. But the reason I took a small break is because the novel is going in a direction that I didn’t expect. So, I needed some time to plot some of it out in my head to figure out what comes next. I guess my brain needed to catch up with my fingers!

Now, I didn’t take an entire day off this past weekend! I’m still writing every day, but on Saturday and Sunday I only wrote about 500 words per day. And I’m okay with that. On Wednesday of this week, I wasn’t able to write at all because of a work engagement. As I mentioned before, some days are going to be better than others. Based on my previous writing experience, I knew that 1K per day wasn’t always going to be easy.

Because I haven’t been outlining either, I also forgot some integral plot points and twists that I had written about earlier, so I finally took some time to go back and reread some of the earlier chapters. Though I didn’t want to, I ended up doing some light editing and even added a few sentences and paragraphs here and there to flush out some scenes. Yes, I know! I wrote an earlier blog post all about NOT doing that, advising you not to look back, but in this case, I needed to refresh my memory as to some scenes and important details I’d written that I wanted to utilize later.

It does feel good to be “over the hump” and halfway through to my goal, but I’m definitely getting that “stuck” feeling a lot more now than I was in the beginning. If this continues to happen, or I lose more of my word count, I’ll probably skip ahead and start working on the ending and work my way back. But for now, I’m still moving forward and hope to be a few more days ahead soon.