The 2026 Novel Writing Challenge: My Task #43

Morning all and welcome back to the writing challenge. I always love the writing phase. At least at this stage. There is always a point around the 20k mark where i think everything I have written is utter garbage and I want to chuck it all away and start over. I don’t, I push past it but that is something to discuss later. Because while I am doing well with the writing I am not nearly there yet. I have noticed that I do tend to go a little past my set hour when I am writing. At the moment that is fine because I know there will be days where I struggle to get the words down. And for me this is pretty normal. In the beginning it is like the words just gush forth, Then they slow as I approach 20K, it is a struggle to get to 30k and then the words start flowing again and towards the end they once again start gushing out like a geyser as i race towards the finale. Each phase presents it’s own editing challenge. As this is the writing section and not the editing portion, you may notice that as I am in the initial word fountain I sometimes trip over sentences. Sometimes it leads to skipping over words that are in my head but I am moving too fast to get onto the page, other times it means I say one thought more than once unintentionally. It is the beauty and fury of a first draft. Yesterday we left off with a word count of 4540. With this session I added 2194 which brings us to a grand total of 6734 words this far. So ticking along just fine. Todays writing is posted below if you are following along and want to see how the story develops from rough outline to first draft.