Eventually, I’m going to need to organize the sections of this book. Right now, I’m writing different sections as the mood and ideas dictate. Some sections are barely 1,000 words, while others are much longer. The one I was working on today is now over 22,000 words, and since I know where it’s going, this is the section I’m most likely to pick up tomorrow, and the night after, and probably the night after that.

Fortunately, I have my beloved whiteboard. I am an enormous fan of the whiteboard for mapping out story lines and relationships between characters. Last year, when I was struggling with Becoming Mrs. Claus, I tried to use Scrivener to sort out my various story lines—I even color-coded the scenes—but in the end, it wasn’t for me. In Scrivener, I had dozens of discrete bits and pieces, whereas once I moved it all into a single Word document, I could see where the holes were that needed to be filled. It turned out that my discrete bits and pieces sat in Scrivener like so many marbles, complete in themselves but unrelated to anything else. Once I’d moved everything to Word, I began working on transitions so that one bit would lead logically to the next. Maybe some people can create connective tissue between scenes in Scrivener, but that skill was beyond me.

One of the most intriguing things about limiting myself to 1,000 (or slightly more) words a day is that writing time goes so quickly. The reality is that 1,000 words isn’t as onerous as it sounds. In fact, it’s only about four double-spaced pages. Most days, it takes less than an hour.

Often, if the work is going well, my inclination is to continue past the 1,000 words. When that happens, I have to be intentional about stopping to ensure I have ideas left for the next day. I suppose I’m afraid of running out of story, because what would I do? What if I were to finish the book at 93,000 words—what would I do for that last week? Rationally, I know this isn’t an actual risk—I tend to write long books—but the what ifs continue to crowd my brain. What if I do reach the end before Day 100? Or the flipside: what if I hit Day 100, and the story’s nowhere near done? Will I just continue at the same pace until I finish? Will I slow down? Speed up?

If I were an outliner, the answer would be easy. I’d just keep following my outline, and when I reached the end of the outline, I’d be at the end of the book. Since I don’t outline, I don’t know whether it’s possible to do an outline so precise that I could finish the book on Day 100, but it’s pretty to think so.

But I’m a discovery writer, which means that I never know precisely where the story is going and how it’s going to end until I get to the moment and say, “Yep. That’s it.” Which isn’t to say I won’t revise that ending a dozen times, but that’s part of the next challenge, whatever it may be.