I don’t mean to be immodest, but I think I deserve a medal. Or a monument. Maybe a parade. At the very least, a round of applause.

Because last night, I kept writing.

Allow me to explain. There’s a judge in a particular set of consolidated cases who issued some extremely unreasonable orders, the upshot of which was that I had four objections due on Saturday, June 15. Yes, you read that right: by court order, they were all due on Saturday. I’d been working on them for two weeks, but the trial lawyers were doing so many depositions that I was constantly being flooded with new transcripts to review and incorporate into my objections.

Two of the objections were easy, because they were identical. The only differences were the names of the plaintiffs and the subject-verb agreement because one case had three plaintiffs and the other had only one, so I had to change a lot of “the plaintiffs have” to “the plaintiff has.” Still, these weren’t difficult. The issue was easy, and I knocked them out relatively quickly.

The third one wasn’t terribly hard, because the motion was completely frivolous: the defendants were trying to get the court to say our expert shouldn’t be allowed to testify. Responding to the motion was a waste of time, but we didn’t have a choice. The time-consuming part was that I had to prepare an appendix with a dozen exhibits. Then, I had to go back through my objection and plug in the citations to the appendix throughout the text. Still, it wasn’t onerous.

Of course, one of the bumps in the road was that the paralegal who was handling the efiling wasn’t expecting to work on Saturday, because her mother had had surgery. Bless her, though—she was more than willing to take care of filing whatever I wrote. I just had to send her the pdfs so she could upload them to the judicial branch website.

It all looked pretty straightforward until I got to the last objection. It was an objection to a motion for summary judgment. If you know msjs, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, here’s all you have to know: our job in opposing the msj was to produce as much evidence as we could to dispute what the other side had said. And when I say “produce as much evidence,” I mean that literally. I had to pull pages from depositions, prepare affidavits, and gather police reports and discovery responses. Then, I had to put it all together, assign exhibit letters, and go back to fill in the citations in the text. In the end, the objection was 31 pages, and the appendix was 471 pages.

Doing these four objections meant that I started work at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, and I sent the last part of the appendix to the trial lawyer and his paralegal at 3:35 a.m. on Sunday. (I’ll spare you doing the math: 14.6 hours, without a break.)

At that point, any sensible person would have said, “I’m going to bed.” I would have said this, too, except that the night before, I’d checked off Day #75. This was a big deal to me. It meant I was three-quarters of the way through my challenge. In what may have been exhaustion-induced irrationality, I decided that no ridiculous court order was going to interfere with my 100-day challenge.

So I wrote.

At about 3:50 a.m., I climbed into bed with my lap desk, Surface, and flash drives. With Olivia sleeping on one side and Charlotte on the other (because they’re smarter than I am), I wrote 1,004 words. They weren’t half-bad, as first drafts go. The scene needs revision, but it has decent bones and advances the plot. As I got to the end and was fighting to stay awake, I typed a bit of gibberish that I had to delete and replace with actual sentences, but at 4:30 a.m., as the night sky was lightening, I declared victory, set aside my Surface, and went to sleep.

That was Day 76. Tonight I wrote again even though I’m exhausted and put in several more hours of work today, including copying all the objections onto a flash drive and taking them to Staples for printing and organizing in binders because His Honor wants paper copies of these behemoths. (No idea whether he’ll give the binders back at the end of the case.) Tomorrow morning, I have to deliver the binders to court. Then, for two days (my best guess), I’ll be able to focus on other cases before the replies start arriving and I need to start prepping trial counsel for argument next Monday. (But no, there’s no break in sight. Believe me, that’s what I was hoping for, too.)

If I hadn’t made this commitment—and if I hadn’t made it publicly—I don’t know whether I’d have written last night. It would have been easy to put the challenge on pause, so to speak. But I wasn’t willing to back down, and that’s what it felt like I’d be doing if I took the night off. I know everybody reading this would have been very understanding and sympathetic, but in a weird way, I didn’t want to let you down–you who have been walking this journey with me.

So please know how much your support means to me. Whether you know it or not, you’re part of what’s keeping me going in this strange and wonderful challenge. Thank you so much!

One other thing: tonight, I watched the Tony Awards, which celebrate Broadway. A wonderful play I saw last spring when it was still in previews, Suffs, was nominated for Best Musical. This meant they got to perform a number from the show during the ceremony. They did the finale, a marvelous song called, “Keep Marching.” (If you don’t know the show, here’s the nutshell version. It’s about the suffragists who won the right for women to vote in the U.S., and it’s an eye-opener because when I was in school, that part of history was pretty much a one-liner, i.e., “The 19th amendment was passed, and women got the right to vote, over and out.” Turns out, it took decades of fighting, including not only marching, but imprisonment and hunger strikes. The fact that Shaina Taub was able to turn that into a musical–and an entertaining one at that–is nothing short of incredible. Brava!) In any case, as I sit here tonight, continuing to write and thinking of all the reasons it would have been perfectly okay to take a night off, the refrain in my head is “Keep Marching.” So, I’ll keep marching.

P.S. This probably isn’t a good time to mention it, but I’m not at all certain that Draft #1 of this book will be finished when I reach the 100-day mark, so I may need to keep going. Just saying.