Almost halfway at the halfway mark

I tried, I really did. And I came close. But in the end the lack of sleep and the fear of yet another 3am wake up call from she-who-will-not-sleep-alone sent me to bed before I had reached my goal.

I didn't make it to 25,000 words by midnight, which would put me smack dab in the middle of my novel, smack dab in the middle of the month. But I did make it to 24,262, which means a couple of things to me. It means that I did some serious catching up in the last few days, after being more than 3,000 words behind at one point. It also means that I'm actually doing this thing. This is the longest body of work that I have ever written, by about 20 pages or so. I tend to write shorter things, and have often wondered if I'm more of a short story writer. So this is exciting territory for me. I'm still not anywhere close to novel length, but, at 50 pages, I think I've surpassed the short story mark, and now it just remains to be seen whether I've got enough in me to sustain the story for another 50 pages, and then another 50...until we have a nice big fat book on our hands. I've come to realize that 50,000 words is only going to be about a hundred pages, which doesn't sound like much of a read. So while I will hit 50K in 30 days, I may just have to continue on from there to produce something that I can be satisfied with. But lets not get ahead of ourselves. It has certainly been a challenge thus far, and the next fifteen days won't be easy. Carving out time to write amidst an already hectic life, a computer-hoarding husband who forces me to write on paper and transcribe during quick breaks while he takes a shower or walks the dog, a daughter whose naps are getting shorter and shorter and who thinks that cuddling with mom in the middle of the night is the greatest thing ever, is tricky to say the least. Trying to master "creativity on demand" in order to maximize my productivity in the little chunks of time I have is perhaps not the best way to produce a literary work of art, but it gets words on the page and besides, I have always enjoyed the editing process. And boy will there be an editing process when all of this is through. I can't even remember how this thing started, and I don't have the time to go back and check.

No, it's not going to be a masterpiece, at least not before some major re-working, but I can't wait to see what it does turn out to be, and I can't wait to print out all 100+ pages and feel the weight of them in my hands.