The Finish the Damn Book Challenge

Awesome, Spell-It-Out!

I took yesterday off too. No farming, just fried. Have a good weekend

I took yesterday off too! Must have been the day for it.

Great numbers everyone, truly!

I finished up my 'write 300 words every day for a month' with just under 24,000 words. I'm going to try for 40,000 words by the end of this month.

Currently sitting on 24,650.

I wanted to get to 25,000 words on this new one last night, but it went up from 19,300 words to 23,500 words, not that I'm complaining. 1 word per day, even 1, is better than none at all, because with 1 word per day, at 80,000 intended word count, we're going to finish it in 80,000 days, and how long have we been alive? I know this is total hyperbole, but you get my point.

Now I'm going to try to get to 30,000 words, although 35,000 would be nice.

February 3, and I'm already well behind where I wanted to be. My father in law passed away the night before last. Life is never going to slow down just because I want to have a regular, productive writing schedule.

I'm currently at 30,169 words and trying to push to 35,000, but I'm tired so I have to take a little nap.

ap123 said:

February 3, and I'm already well behind where I wanted to be. My father in law passed away the night before last. Life is never going to slow down just because I want to have a regular, productive writing schedule.

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Sorry for your loss

I've been working on character exercises more than writing, trying to flesh out my story a bit. It's becoming a bit introspective.

Dunno if this short's gonna become a novella at this point or not, but my current progress is 3,953 words. 610 words for today. Just got past a huge conversational chapter in which both central characters (which includes the MMC) prodded and poked at each other verbally and got development. Hard-ass section to write.

It also includes a part of Chapter III. (Apparently, short stories can be split into chapters, which is cool).

Couldn't quite make it to 35,000 words but made it to 33,000 and that's enough for today for me. If I could do 12,000 words a day in my previous WIP for four days, I can do 7,000 words later today to get to 40,000. I'm also about to start a YA drama called Dangerous Intentions.

So I started Dangerous Intentions yesterday at around 8:15 AM EST before my trip to Walmart at 10:00 AM, and from 8:15 AM to 1:19 AM EST today, I did 12,000 words, 4 chapters of 3,000 words each. That's right. That's what always happens at the beginning. These characters turned out to be more aggressive than the ones in my regular books! I can't stop writing what they're doing, wow, and the daydreams I had with them this morning. Ooh, I'm going to be writing for a while. At that speed I might finish my first draft in 5 days, and that would be me breaking my record of finishing a first draft in 15 days, a 120,000-word one. Wow. And those hours weren't even straight because I did my shopping at Walmart and I didn't start writing again till like 1:00 PM yesterday, and then I just kept writing, and writing, and writing.

I'm going to have to make a new ticker, but it's not going to last long in my signature, 10 days, tops, if I take it easy and only do 6,000 words a day. Wow.

ap123 said:

February 3, and I'm already well behind where I wanted to be. My father in law passed away the night before last. Life is never going to slow down just because I want to have a regular, productive writing schedule.

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I'm sorry for your loss, I hope that you and your family are okay.

Currently at 20,330 words and I just got into a scene that although not very graphic, or better said, not graphic at all, is going to be very difficult to write, because the very idea that my MC could do something so terrible...it just breaks my heart. I had imagined this from the moment I was at my first 1,800 words when I was at Walmart yesterday, but I was trying to push away from it, and I couldn't. It's finally here, the scene that creates the entire plot of the story, the reason why it's called Dangerous Intentions. My MC was so good until now but I have to write this because the bad guy has to pay, and he will continue to pay as the story progresses. He'll never escape my MC. This is so sad. I'll see you guys again when I hit, (if I hit) 24,000 words.

Good luck with writing that scene, Christina! I'm sure you'll be able to do it.

So I finally put my but in my chair and got some words cranked out, although the quality is complete crap, I'm glad that I'm back to writing. I wrote 1,100 words today, and hopefully I'll be able to continue this. =)

Almondjoy said:

Good luck with writing that scene, Christina! I'm sure you'll be able to do it.

So I finally put my but in my chair and got some words cranked out, although the quality is complete crap, I'm glad that I'm back to writing. I wrote 1,100 words today, and hopefully I'll be able to continue this. =)

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I just couldn't make my MC do something so horrible. I know that in order to be realistic and believable, good guys in stories have to be capable of doing horrible things. No one's completely good or evil. My MC's going to be involved in mischief later in the series, (4 books, 2 YA, 2 adult, as in not YA) but nothing as horrible as what I had him do and then decided against. That's right, I wrote it, and then I deleted it. He's still going to do something horrible, but not horrible enough to put him in jail for the rest of his life like what I had him do and then I undid. I hope that makes sense.

Congrats. I just wrote 9000 words and I'm pushing for 3000 more.

Thank you for the good thoughts, Anna and Spell it Out.

WIP: Frag Hag
Goal: 85,000 words by June 1.
Current: 32,400 words
Daily goal: Still squishy at the moment, trying to get back into the discipline.

I'm thinking my hero isn't all that lovable right now. Trying not to get stuck on the suspicion, and continue writing forward, it should be fixable later.

Hi everyone,

Looks like I'm gonna be taking a break from this thread for a while....finished the first draft of "The Angel of Death".
I had hoped it would reach 100,000 words, but it fell short by some distance. I tried to stretch it, but I knew that was the wrong thing to do. So, I've typed "The End" a few hours ago.

Gonna put it away for a month or so before tackling the second draft. Thanks to everyone on this thread - Ap123, Christina(the machine ), Anna, FrenchMaiden, Almond and all the others I'm failing to mention.

I'm not gonna leave you, I've just no need to post my progress for a while.

Best of luck to you all, and thanks for the kind words over the last number of weeks.

Spell-it-out said:

Hi everyone,

Looks like I'm gonna be taking a break from this thread for a while....finished the first draft of "The Angel of Death".
I had hoped it would reach 100,000 words, but it fell short by some distance. I tried to stretch it, but I knew that was the wrong thing to do. So, I've typed "The End" a few hours ago.

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Excellent news! Congratulations, I look forward to hearing/seeing more about The Angel of Death.

Yanno, looking at my last sentence, it could be interpreted a number of ways.

Spell-it-out said:

Hi everyone,

Looks like I'm gonna be taking a break from this thread for a while....finished the first draft of "The Angel of Death".
I had hoped it would reach 100,000 words, but it fell short by some distance. I tried to stretch it, but I knew that was the wrong thing to do. So, I've typed "The End" a few hours ago.

Gonna put it away for a month or so before tackling the second draft. Thanks to everyone on this thread - Ap123, Christina(the machine ), Anna, FrenchMaiden, Almond and all the others I'm failing to mention.

I'm not gonna leave you, I've just no need to post my progress for a while.

Best of luck to you all, and thanks for the kind words over the last number of weeks.

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Wow, congrats!! How exciting to finally finish a draft. =) I hope to see you back when you decide to work on something new!!

I'm not really feeling it today. I've had a really crappy day, so I think that's affecting my writing today. Only written 370 today, but hopefully I'll be able to get back into it and write some more later in the night.

So close to my desired 36,000 word mark for today. Less than 2k words more \o/ My MC is starting a new life in a new country!

Currently at 40,000 of the 48,000 words that I intended to do today, but I am going to try to get to 45,000 before I go to sleep tonight because lately I've been going to sleep at 2:00 in the morning EST, and it's 10:45 PM, and I just slept from like 7:45 PM to 10:15 PM so I have plenty of time and I won't feel groggy tomorrow morning at sunrise.


I just have a brilliant future planned for my character. I'm going to make him an international pop star who's going to go into heavy metal later on in the story, on the last installment of the series, and I just can't give my character such a wonderful life to take it away from him later on because he raped a classmate. That's right, that's what I had him do that I later deleted and replaced with him doing something just as messed up, but not as unforgivable as rape. My series is named Fallen Angel. I changed the name because it's centered on the trials and tribulations of my very-weird, depressed, and sometimes cuckoo character.

Probably a good idea I join in

Silver Linings:

Words: 4,100 / 100,000

Goals: 30 minutes each day minimum, 3,000 words (A Chapter) each fortnight, to have beta draft ready for November 2013.

I would like to write more each day, but daily life condemns it

JFitchett92 said:

Probably a good idea I join in
Goals: 30 minutes each day minimum, 3,000 words (A Chapter) each fortnight, to have beta draft ready for November 2013.

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Welcome, and best of luck. No shortage of support on this thread.

I reached my 45,000 out of 48,000 words that I wanted to do last night. I slept only 4 hours, from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM but I don't feel tired because of those 2 extra hours of sleep I had earlier on from 7:45 to 10:00 PM, so I'm good. I wrote 5,000 words last night from 10:00 PM to 3:00 AM. Not too shabby. First book of series almost done, only 15,000 words to go. I can't do 15,000 words in one day, my maximum is 12,000 a day, but I am going to do what I can today and I'll finish it tomorrow, Sat. Feb. 9th, on my nephew's 14th birthday. Go, Richard!

Currently at 51,000 words. Want to get to 54,000/60,000 words on the first draft, but if I don't I won't be disappointed. There's an adult character, Adam's older brother, that no one knew about until now. He appeared when I was like 40,000 words in, and now I have to add words to the manuscript because he's an important character and I don't want to make it seem like this character literally appeared out of nowhere. I am going to add chapters in between the manuscript writing the story of Shane Morley. I know, Adam and Shane are my favorite character names, but since the word count is going to change, the genre is also going to change because the chapters I'm going to add will make the story add up to like 100,000 and so far I haven't seen an agent even accepting a 100,000-word YA novel lately. We're not all Stephenie Meyer, who was able to get a behemoth to an agent of a book that added up to almost 800 pages. I don't know how many words that was, but I imagine it was close to 200,000 words because I once wrote a manuscript, published it POD, and it was 700 pages long, and the word count of the document clocked in at an astounding 219,000 words. One word. Ouch.

Hopefully by the second installment of this series I will have decided what characters are important to the story, the complete story, and not add any new characters, like ever again, just make a list of my characters and say how they are important to the story and just keep them and not add anyone new. This series will have two installments with my MC's as teenagers and three installments with them as adults, and then by the fifth installment their children are going to be MC's. Wish me luck. This ain't gonna be easy.

ChristinaLayton said:

I reached my 45,000 out of 48,000 words that I wanted to do last night. I slept only 4 hours, from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM but I don't feel tired because of those 2 extra hours of sleep I had earlier on from 7:45 to 10:00 PM, so I'm good. I wrote 5,000 words last night from 10:00 PM to 3:00 AM. Not too shabby. First book of series almost done, only 15,000 words to go. I can't do 15,000 words in one day, my maximum is 12,000 a day, but I am going to do what I can today and I'll finish it tomorrow, Sat. Feb. 9th, on my nephew's 14th birthday. Go, Richard!

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12,000 a day :O That is impressive! I could only dream of having the time to write that much!

I imagine you must be frustrated being so close? I'm frustrated being so far away! And as it's Feb 9th, I guess a happy birthday is in order for your nephew

Hi all! Thought I'd join in.

I started 3 weeks or so ago, and I hit 16,000 words today. My general goal is to write about 1000 words a day, as that's what seems to insist on coming out at the moment. Wish I had time to do more.

It's looking like this is going to be 70,000 words or so total, so probably April finish for the first draft. Though I'm sure life will get in the way before that!