Yes, the clock was accurate.

See that clock? That’s when I started writing for Day 10.

I didn’t write 1,000 words. I worked on my book for around forty-five minutes before I called it a night. But I did write.

To back up: Monday was a busy day. Working around a follow-up appointment with the surgeon’s office (they say all is well!), then researching and writing three motions that need to be filed today (didn’t finish until about half an hour ago), interrupted by a board meeting (on Zoom, thank heaven), after which I fed the cats and microwaved leftovers for my own dinner as I resumed work on the motions.

Around 10:30 p.m., my brain started to fade. I found myself playing an online game where you find as many words as you can in the title of a show’s episode. I stopped at 550, but I really don’t think those words count toward my 1,000. Then it was time to clean up the kitchen, give the cats their meds and bedtime snacks, and generally try to put a few things in order.

To be honest, I was ready to kick Day Ten to the curb. Last year, I had two days where I didn’t write, and I simply bumped them over. On the other hand, I had good reasons for missing those days—one of them was the day of my father’s funeral. Yesterday’s reasons were legitimate, but I could arguably have skipped the word game and written those 550 words in my manuscript instead.

So why didn’t I just call the day lost, go to bed early, and commit to ending this challenge one day late? It wasn’t just that I’d have had to write about that in this post, although to be candid, that did factor in.

The reason I didn’t skip was that I really, really want to develop a practice of writing every day. As it is, I won’t have that book finished by the end of June (such a sweet, naïve hope). In fact, I’m struggling with the question of whether it’ll be out for the holidays as I’ve hoped, because I don’t want to publish a half-assed book just to get something out because I’ve told so many people about it. Given many unexpected expenses, I can’t afford to take off a block of time and work on it even though this is what I’d dearly love to do. So I write when I can, even if it’s 2:00 in the morning.

And I really did write. Actually, I edited, deleting language, replacing it, and adding transitions. I have no idea how many words I ended up writing, because I didn’t keep track of how many I was cutting. Not that it mattered.

What mattered was that I wrote. I didn’t miss the day.

Photo credit: Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash