The Thirty Day Writing Challenge

Good morning everybody! I recently decided that my fourth draft is taking far too long to complete. So yesterday I made a radical decision.

I have twenty eight days to finish my book, beginning yesterday. (Yes, yes, the title says “thirty”. Well it sounds better, alright? Sue me.) (I’m only kidding, please don’t do that.) I’m figuring that my draft will be complete at around 100,000 words, so that’s my specific word count goal. In order to reach that, I need to write—and this is the exact number, by the way—2,791 words every day. Yesterday, I surpassed that goal by a few hundred—and I couldn’t have done it without Dabble Writer’s word sprints. At eight p.m. Monday night, I had only nine hundred words. I was about ready to give up, because it took me three hours to write them. Three hours!! But then I remembered an email I’d gotten that morning, about writing sprints at 8:05 and 8: 30, and I decided I’d attend.

Just as one last attempt to boost my word count.

I don’t know if it’s because of the time limit, the friendly competition, or what, but I wrote over six hundred words in twenty minutes. Right after taking three whole hours to write less than double of that.

My mind was blown. I went to the second one as well, and got about five hundred and fifty. Still not quite at my goal, so I did one last one, this time by myself. At this point I was losing steam, so I got three hundred in ten minutes before copy-pasting all my progress into Reedsy and turning in for the night.

But do you know how I felt? This burning sense of accomplishment lifted me out of my menstruating mood swings and into the arms of the writings gods. Not even my youngest sister’s snarky comments about my writing could bring me down.

Just like in Duolingo, my streak has begun. Unfortunately, there’s no scary green owl to hold me to my commitment, but I’m confident that I can reach this goal if I try.

So! I’ll be keeping you all updated, and hosting writing sprints pretty much every day. (I’ll add a widget on my home page with sprint links later.) I hope to see some of you there! Happy writing!

P.S. Does anybody have anything exciting going on?