Today was a beautiful day: clear, dry, even slightly cool as evening fell. Considering nasty-hot weather last week and the violent storms over the weekend—including a tornado warning on Saturday, followed by a power failure and a lack of internet—today, I felt as if I’d survived something.

Then, I counted how close I am to the end of this challenge, and that feeling multiplied. For 85 days, I’ve stayed faithful. Every night for nearly three months, I’ve written at least 1,000 words of my novel, and often more. The story has blossomed in ways I never saw coming. New characters, new settings, new challenges (for me and for them).

The funny thing is that as the formal challenge is winding down—just over two weeks left!—I’m already thinking ahead to how I’m going to edit once I finish drafting. In my quest to lay out the story and find out what it’s really about, I haven’t devoted a lot of energy to artistry, so I know there’s a boatload of work to do in this regard.

I also have a number of research holes to plug, so once the draft is finished, I plan to devote time to some intense research in order to bring certain sections to more vivid life. I’ve been researching as I go, but it’s generally involved quick internet searches about whatever I’ve found myself writing about on a given day. Soon, it’ll be time to delve into these topics in depth, to slow down and explore these areas that are new to me.

Once the complete draft actually exists—and I highly doubt I’ll finish it by July 9—I’ll be able to spend time pondering, imagining, selecting details. I can’t recall now who first told me to “go deeper” into a particular story, but I know there are scenes where I need to go much deeper in order to connect the reader with what’s going on in the character’s mind or heart.

I think part of what I’m enjoying is the prospect of ample time. I knew coming into this that there was no way I’d have the book ready for release for this holiday season. Since it’s a seasonally-themed story, the obvious release time is next fall. That means I have the better part of a year to finish drafting and start the next phase, to get the story in order, properly researched and edited and polished.

I know, of course, that there will be interruptions. Life wouldn’t be life if it clicked along smoothly. The notion of having plenty of time to do anything is so foreign to me that I’m already half-convinced that somewhere along the line, a major crisis will erupt at an inopportune time, because this is how my life normally runs. As soon as I’m ahead of schedule, a problem arises that means I’ll still end up scrambling. Here’s an example: one year, I bought my sister’s birthday present months in advance simply because I found something I knew she’d love. By the time her birthday came along, work was as slow as it had ever been, and I was scraping by. If I’d had to come up with money for her gift at that time, I don’t know how I’d have done it. Luckily, I didn’t have to worry, because for once, I’d been ahead of the game .

This is one of the reasons I’m glad I’ve worked to stick with this challenge. At the very least, when July 9 comes to a close, I’ll have written more than 100,000 words of this novel. Even if some unforeseen disaster crashes down, I’m way ahead of where I’d have been if I’d spent the past three months noodling at the story and figuring I had tons of time.

Besides, it’s been fun. Writing every day means I’ve been living in the world of my story. My mind never fully disconnects from these characters. A line of dialogue or a thought about plot comes to mind at the weirdest times, because these people and their problems are always with me. It’s like binging a new favorite series, the kind where you can start at the beginning and keep watching (or reading) day after day, secure in the knowledge that there are still more great episodes ahead.