Howdy,
I really have to write now—right now!
After yesterday’s post, that’s the push. Not the 200K word goal: but just to blitz anything I get the chance, and I figure I ought to give that a go at least for this day after I said it’d be a good idea, a good approach, a good way to finish.
It strikes me that it’s weird to me that I now think of being within 40,000 words to go as being near the end, as being almost done, as being the time to make a push for a strong finish, as the marker for breaking into a sprint.
Forty thousand words (40,000!) is a lot for me—or it certainly would have been in the past. I mentioned yesterday that I’ve never written 200,000 words in a year’s time and in saying so realized that I’ve never in a year written the 160,000 words that I’ve already penned and pulled together on this project to practice and publish, perform and improve, (digital) ink blot by (digital) ink blot, day after day (and double days after a missed one—promises and commitments broken, but momentum still carrying through and keeping the spirit of the projection alive).
And now today I’m contemplating the reality that it is likely that I’ve never written 40,000 words in a year. Maybe. But I don’t like so. I have an 86,000 word novel, but it took me longer than two years to write. Much longer.
I don’t know what my most words in a year previous to this last year of writing has been, but it’s far second to the 160,000 I have and the 200K that I’m going for (as you all know—thank you for your patience on this goal becoming a topic in and of itself: I know that’s not best, but as we close in on it, it’s pretty cool to be able to reflect on it a bit; of course in the beginning it was a topic because I was launching it and attempting to communicate what I was committing to [probably an element of trying to convince myself], and then in the middle it was a topic because it was a monster in my life, with that ever-streaking word pace blitzing ahead of me, but now the end, the end is better, and feels worthy of reflecting and debriefing—for an appreciation and a strong finish, because that’s still to come).
In conclusion of my contemplation, that’s one of the great things, one of the payoffs, of this commitment to writing that I’ve been on this year: 40,000 words doesn’t seem like a lot right now. Even though I may never have written that much in a year, I have no doubt of the chances of getting it done in a couple of months time, because if I write now and I write tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow—always—I will get there. The 160,00 words so far tell me that story, giving hints to the ending, and that there will be a moment and a place that says: THE END.
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
Word Count: 161,170 / On Pace: 160,600 / Year’s Goal: 200,000
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