Hi to any and all that happens to read this. I want to thank you for checking in with me today, now one month into my accountability challenge! The main goal is to write 5,000 words each week, which I’m happy to report that I was able to achieve in this fourth week! The month’s total wordcount is 20,759 words, which is an exciting number to hit at any point.

I started out really strong this week, hitting 3,942 words in the first two days! I had a big foot through that door, and was feeling pretty good about it. The only problem was that it was easy to become complacent, relying on the fact that I only had so far to go over the rest of the week.

If I hadn’t eased off, knowing that most of it was all done, I could have really smashed the goal this week. But since I did pull back, all cocky and “too busy” binge watching Netflix, I was forced to make a mad dash at the tail end of the week. It was a real life tortoise and the hare kind of thing.

But a really exciting thing happened throughout it all. I was at a crossroads, and my story could have gone one of two ways. I originally planned for my Main Characters to link up with a family of strangers that would aide them in their travels.

The planned out scenes were crystal clear in my head, and it was going to have some heartfelt moments with a dash of intrigue. But then I thought of all the words that would be needed to hit those points, and the lack of real world time that existed in that world I write in for these things to pan out. I mean, we’re taking a matter of hours in their timeline; how could I try to cram so much into such a small span of time?

Then I came up with a better solution. It cut the family and heartfelt moments out completely, but I get to keep the intrigue, and I even get to add a bit of action. And in the end, I need bits of action throughout my book; the genre demands it!

The original scene would have been just more banter, eating up time in the world as they get to where they are going. Honestly, I hate writing about these characters traveling, but I created this problem for myself by adding more characters that are split off doing their own, highly important things. And I don’t want to just break away from the original Main characters for chapters upon chapters, only to spring back to them at the end.

Whatever issues come from it, I’ll fix it in my revisions. Nothing is unfixable. I’m just happy that I get to keep writing, changing up my story in bittersweet ways.

Until next week: keep doing the things you love, and make the best of your time… even if it’s binge watching shows when you know you should be writing.