This isn’t going to be a long note, I just wanted to share some final words of encouragement to end the year with good momentum. I’m not at all a proponent of hustle culture, but I’ve seen how ending a day, or week, or month, or year strong helps keep the momentum going on long projects, and sometimes that involves us pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones.

After waffling on whether I should push myself or take it easy and try for a steady pace with a longer timeframe to finish the book I’m working on, I decided to push and finish the book by the end of the year. I was on a roll for a few days and then messed it up by trying to edit too much as I go along. Right now it looks like I need to do about 3k words a day to finish by the end of the year, which isn’t out of the question.

That final word count has a buffer built in that will let me cut 15% of what I write and still have a manuscript close my goal word count. I’m still just traumatized by almost a decade spent writing vomit drafts that were so unusable I’d have to start from scratch every time, especially the second half which I where I have the most trouble. I feel better about the structure of this one though, more than I have any of the others, because I wrote up a four page synopsis before I started writing. I’ve also been reading Matt Bell’s great book Refuse to be Done so I know I have a guide for the next steps after finishing this draft. It’s a great safety net to work with.

So I just need to keep my eyes on the goal, trust my process, and trust I’m better at this than I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 20 years ago.