Tobias Buckell recommends that writers
reward only the activities that they can control.
For three-and-a-half weeks now, my short-term goal has only been to write a thousand words a day. And even when it's been difficult, I have reached that goal. My mid-range goal has been to finish the Danger of Being Me, and by achieving my short-term goal, that mid-range goal is within reach. It may be another two or three weeks - I once again vastly misunderestimated the amount of story packed into the three remaining scenes - but it's literally just a matter of time now.
But last night, I hit a milestone that I hadn't really considered to be a milestone until it was in sight. It should have been simple math, and getting there shouldn't have been all that astonishing. But it was. Because in roughly five hours last night, I wrote 1,099 words to finish the section I left hanging last night and complete the next one in line. And my Excel spreadsheet told me that my total manuscript had reached 99,670 words, or just longer than
Harper Lee's 1960 novel
To Kill a Mockingbird.
So I shot for the moon again, because once more I was just too close not to. I wrote another 331 words in the first half of the next section for a total of 1,430 on the night, and took the wordcount for this project to exactly 100,001. A hundred-thousand words. And I have to admit that it kind of takes my breath away.
And I also realized this morning that according to my Excel spreadsheet, I have written 29,671 words in the last 27 days, averaging 1,141 words per day. And that includes a day I spend editing, in which I wrote zero new words for the novel. During the 26 of those days that I worked on the Danger of Being Me, I averaged 1,187 words per day.
So I'm taking the weekend off. I'm going down to a beach house in
Emerald Isle and spending time with family. That's going to be my pellet for myself, my reward for hitting a hundred-thousand words. But more than that, it's going to be my reward for proving to myself that I could change my own behavior simply by choosing to do so.
Because it really is just a question of doing.