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).

It turns out that there are downsides and upsides to a daily writing practice.

The upsides are obvious. First and foremost, productivity. With 69 days in the bank and a minimum of 1,000 words each day, I’m well on my way to a first draft of my book. Had I not started this challenge, I’d probably be thinking and making notes and occasionally jotting down a page or two.

If I were working in this fashion, it’s likely most of the book would never come to be, because this practice is keeping the story in my mind so that my subconscious is working even when I’m doing other things. This, I think, is an even bigger benefit of a daily writing practice. For example, last evening as I was coming home from the fish market, a snippet of dialogue occurred to me. Since I was on the highway and couldn’t stop to write it down, I recorded a voice memo on my phone. Later, when I wrote it in my purple notebook, it was almost new to me—proof that if I hadn’t recorded it, I’d have forgotten it.

Photo credit: Marty O’Neill on Unsplash

Sixty-four days down. Nearly two-thirds of the way to my present goal.

Then what?

(I really need to learn how to recognize an accomplishment without immediately looking beyond it, but that’s for another post.)

What’s truly odd is the extent to which I’m finding myself thrown by Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer, which started on Saturday. Somehow, I’d lost track of the days enough that when I received Jami’s first letter on June 1 which encouraged me to write 1,000 words, my first thought was, “Yeah, whatever.” One thousand words a day for fourteen days feels like practically nothing this year, and yet last year, it was a huge deal. The year before—the year my father died during #1000wordsofsummer—I stayed faithful, missing two days and making them up at the end. And yet this year, a part of me feels like, “Fourteen days. So what?”

It’s astonishing, how fast perspective shifts.

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.

Can you believe it? I’m halfway to my goal. For 50 days, I’ve written at least 1,000 words per day on my novel—plus whatever blog posts and cat bios I’ve squeezed in. That’s more than 50,000 words in slightly more than a month and a half.

It doesn’t seem real.

Today, I received an email Jami Attenberg mailed in preparation for #1000wordsofsummer. In it, she talked about preparing for the challenge of writing 1,000 words every day for fourteen days. I remember when fourteen days felt like an impossible challenge. Now, it just seems like what you want to do if your goal is to write a book.