Word count: 40,123.

Hooray! I made it to 40,000 words! It feels like the beginning of the end from here. It’s like when you are on the highway, and you see the sign that the exit to your destination is 2km away. You’re not there yet, but you know it’s not far off.

Now that I’m back on track with my word count, I feel like I can take off a lot of the pressure I’ve been putting on myself. After having the days of needing to write 2500-3000 words to not fall further behind, writing only 1667 words in a day seems easy… I never thought I’d say that. At the same time as getting back on track, I feel like I’ve had better focus on writing. Tonight is one of the few times that I’ve finished my writing for the day, and it’s not 11:30pm or 12am.

After Saturday – when I wrote out a plan of the scenes that I needed to write before the end of the book – I’ve slowly been ticking those off. I have 15 scenes written down, and I’ve managed to write 6 of those now. And they’re starting to be really fun scenes to write as well, where some of the mysteries surrounding the story are getting revealed to the main character.

Every now and then, I’ll tweak these a little bit – maybe move one scene a little later or drop one scene if it does make sense to have it – but I’m definitely finding having a list of scenes to write that I can then tick off as I complete them very satisfying.