The 2026 Novel Writing Challenge: My Task #44

Morning all. It is time for another day of writing. My brain is finally starting to see the hour as part of my schedule. It is the first week so it is still new but I didn’t have to check the calendar Which is the sign that it is starting to be a habit. Monday after a weekend off is going to be the test. If I remember it is part of the morning without checking then it is on it’s way to becoming a habit. For now, lets do a word count recap. Yesterday I ended my wordcount at 6734. Today I added 2242 more words and so my current total is 8976.

I know some of you are thinking keeping track of the daily wordcount is a bit much, but for me it helps me with the habit building. There is a part of me that thinks, it’s just an hour how much can get done in an hour? But if I see the numbers add up then I my brain gets all tingly and I can see I am making progress, which is extra incentive to keep the habit. Also I have my word count page where I color in boxes after a thousand words. I can only fill them in when I have reached or passed the number and each of my boxes is 1000 words. The fact that I can’t fill in the 9000 square because I am at 8976 means that even if I don’t feel like writing when my scheduled time comes around I will think about how close I am to filling in that box and I will tell myself that I just need to work a little to get to 9000. So I will sit down and write just to do that and then continue on for the full scheduled writing time. For me it is often about getting started. Once I start I am generally in. Until I start there is a long list of other things I could be doing instead circling in my head.

So sometimes things like this help. I am in general not too obsessed with word count (especially since I know it will change with editing), but something about this sort of trickery helps me on days when I am finding it hard to get started. I don’t know if your brain works in a similar fashion, but perhaps it can help you.

And no onto today’s writing segment, if you are reading remember, this is a very rough first draft serving as an example of how I get from rough outline to manuscript.