Write Till Christmas

When I signed up to Write Till Christmas and pledged 20,000 words of a new novel, I felt fabulous. Like, how good would it be to have 20,000 words written of a new manuscript?

Brilliant!

Alright. It was what I call a stretch target, an aspirational ‘in the ether’ goal. I didn’t consider my paid work, the usual craziness of late November, whole of December end-of-year events plus school holidays. I just plucked a number out of the air - not too small and not too ridiculously large.

I was excited (and delusional). A decent chunk of a shiny new manuscript called to me like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The kind of pot you find and not keep aimlessly chasing.

It was mid-September, and I had a few weeks to plan this out before 1 October came around. I was confident the book I’ve had in my head for so long was going to pour out onto the page.

So, I did the math. Eighty-six days or strictly speaking eighty-five because who’s going to be sweating a deadline on Christmas Day? So, approximately 235 words a day.

Well!

That’s easy. So doable.

Ahem. The first day of October came and went. The days ticked by. One week later and I’d written zero words. Gulp.

I was writing - prepping parts of my manuscript for competitions and writing a short story. Just no words down on a new story.

It was time to calmly review the situation.

I created a spreadsheet to track my daily progress because spreadsheets make things clear for me and I was feeling pretty deflated. My numbers told me, I should have had 1,647 words written by now.

As I pondered a strategy that wouldn’t end up with me binging twenty thousand words and killing myself the week before Christmas something amazing happened.

Manifesting, maybe. I could actually see myself on Christmas day with twenty-thousand new words so I knew I’d get there.

The same evening, I was sitting on the carpet close to our sunroom, which years ago was my office. Where I sat, I was eye-line with a shelf crammed full of papers, ragged looking exercise books and files. They looked suspiciously like mine.

I pulled a pile out. Years and years of my writing. Turned out that I’d already written a lot of this story already. In fact, I found drafts of other stories I’d handwritten that were on my ‘to-write’ list.

I’d found my pot of gold.

The next day I started to dictate my scrawls onto Word and hey presto I had 10,000 words without even making much of a dent in what I’d found. Quite possibly I’m looking at 30,000 - 40,000 words by Christmas.

Yes, I haven’t physically written new words of a new manuscript since 1 October, but my goal was to have 20,000 words of a new novel by Christmas.

And I will!

Beyond ecstatic and HUGELY thankful to Write Till Christmas! On Instagram @WriteTillChristmas It’s only because I joined this amazing group and made a crazy pledge that I have the bones of a fantastic story on Scrivener to work on.

The writing community is the best!