September 24th – 800,520

That’s it, I had a fabulous writing morning, and as a result hit close to 5k words – 4,973 to be precise, meaning I sailed past the 800k mark to the figure above. This particular manuscript is flowing, and I’m hitting the target word count on it even without the other two bits of writing. Certainly my average count for the last three days is over a thousand words higher than I was managing before the holiday. I guess it would be fair to say my batteries were recharged by the wet and windy weather in Wales last week.

To sum up – this challenge has resulted in completed first drafts of:

8 novels
4 novellas

On top of that:
12 starts – ranging from 1,500 to 20,000 words written on different stories, which includes the 20k written on my current work in progress.

Of those, 5 of the novels, and 2 of the novellas have also had a fairly severe edit pass, so you could class them as second drafts – ready for another good edit pass prior to submission.

And of course, I’ve still got 200,000 words to go, well 199,480 if you want to be precise about it.

I started this challenge thinking it would be hard to do, but worthwhile, and I have to admit it has been hard to keep going on some days, but most of the time it’s become an obsession to get the word count done – and then more so. I’ve missed a total of 24 days due to holidays and major family events, and have written every day other than those, only falling below the word count on 2 days out of the entire time. “Write every day” is one of those old sayings that are trotted out to you at writing groups at almost every meeting, and so far this year, putting that to the test has shown there is a lot of truth in it.

You don’t have to write like me, or even try for word count like me – but I can only encourage you to write every day – take it from me – it works!