Day One recap: We're going to need a bigger book.

So yesterday was a really good word count day. I was looking at my daily word counts from last year, and see that yesterday's total of 2715 would have been my fifth highest word count from last year. That's the good news. There are, however, a couple downsides. First of all, the first day is probably the most effortless day. There's no fatigue from having done this for how many days in a row, and you don't have to worry about repeating any story elements because you haven't written anything down yet. The other downside, and this is specific to my 2005 novel, is that this thing is destined to be much more than 50,000 words. So I got my quota for yesterday, but that's assuming that I'm stopping at 50k. I think most people would agree that what defines the end of a novel is the ending rather than putting down a book once you've read 50,000 words.

In terms of the entire endeavour, they play this up like it's some massive undertaking, that you can kiss all your free time goodbye for the entire month. I guess it depends on how busy you are to start off with, and it helps that I have an hour of writing already scheduled into the day that I'm using. This doesn't account for unexpected distractions, writer's block, emergencies, etc. And now that I think about the other writing project with deadlines this month, it gets a little trickier.

It's 7:23 and I'm already over 100 words for the day. Go early birds!