Starting word count: 84250
Ending word count: 86938
Total words: 2688

This morning as I wrote, I was accompanied by the lovely sound of my stand mixer working away kneading my pizza dough because, now that I’ve made it hundreds of times, I no longer feel the need (most weekends) to feel the dough under my hands. I think it’s good practice, especially when you’re new to a recipe because getting the right feel on the dough really is something special, but this recipe is like an old, cosy jumper at this point. Easy and familiar.

I started out trying to finish up chapter 21, but I ended up getting a spark of an idea for the end of the novel and working there quite a bit today. I still have a little bit of residual anxiety, apparently, about these middle chapters, and I’m finding it hard to figure out what I need to say there. Things are coming together though — the end of the book piece I wrote today was sparked by something one of my main characters did in ch21 — but despite the fact that I am genuinely very happy to get into this doc every day, I am still feeling some type of way about the middle part of the book. It’s the same feeling as always, I think, the, like, frustration with continuing to hammer away writing chapters that I know are going to either get edited out completely or are going to change so much they’re nothing like the way they were in the first draft. And the very fun feeling, too, that these chapters aren’t even that good anyway so why am I even bothering?

But, as I keep reminding myself, writing these words is still an important part of the process. And you can’t edit words that aren’t there.

Once I finished that scene in the later chapter (and, with it, ended up finishing the whole chapter), I went back to look at ch21 to see if I was just being ridiculous about it (spoiler: I was). I was maybe a few paragraphs away from finishing chapter 21, so I buckled myself in and made myself write it. It ended up, once I got into it, coming easier than I expected and there’s one paragraph in particular that I really like that I can’t wait to workshop and really make shine.

All in all, it was a reasonably good writing day — I spent a good bit of time outside (the air is getting cold again which I very much appreciate) and I managed to get all my words written well before dinner time, so. Victory!

Let’s be friends on NaNo! Or listen to my project writing playlist!