It was an eventful last few weeks with the book.

The first thing of note was that I had my first writing session for this project where I was unhappy with the result to such an extent that I scrapped the chapter. I knew this moment would come eventually, but it was still startling. I'd gone the first 13,000 or so words "on a roll" with each writing session producing the forward momentum I wanted. I still went behind these chapters and revised, but they were mostly out "in one breath".

So the other morning, feeling completely let down by the 3000 words I'd written, I did feel a bit nervous. Would this lead to the project stalling out? Perhaps I'd gone as far as I could with it and was out of ideas. I knew these things weren't true of course. But that's part of the tricky thing about writing in general, but also for a longer project like this. I am relying solely on myself for encouragement and my own judgement to determine if I've made a wrong turn in the story. This is a cool feeling at times but also lonely. I ended up rewriting it the next morning and getting it to a place I was more satisfied with.

I think one of my strengths as a writer, and one of my favorite parts of writing and reading, is the "set up". I love setting a tone, an atmosphere, and the early ideas which will ripple out across a story. And I love the beginning of great books for this same reason too. Now that I am getting further in I know I need to transcend the set up and start getting to the core of the story. This is exciting but of course, intimidating. And I think my first experience floundering on this project is a result of these feelings. It's one thing to have a good premise and to handle the introduction well, but an entire other thing to "stick the landing". Having never gone this far with my writing, I am naturally wondering: can I?

Then something else happened... I hit 20,000 words this week. For those who may not know, that's about a quarter of the standard novel (80,000 words or 250 pages). This means that this project is officially the longest single piece of writing I've ever done. It feels like a genuine milestone. It's also puzzling. I don't feel like I've written a quarter of a novel already (I even pulled a book from my shelf to remember what 70 or so pages feel like)... I have many more ideas for the story and things to weave into it. But still, it feels worth celebrating. I coded up little animated celebrations in the writing tracker app I built before starting this project which trigger at key milestones based on the word count goal you enter. It was nice seeing the first one trigger. But the nicest part was that I wrote a new chapter in one session, proving that the previous morning where I felt lost was indeed just a normal setback - all part of the process.

At this point in the project, I feel confident that I can write a novel's worth of words and hit 80,000. But I still feel very uncertain about whether or not I can write an actual novel though, a story that comes together in the kind of clean way my favorite books all do. In any case, I have no issues trusting the writing, day by day.