I just hit 5,000 words on my novel! I’m taking this story slower than a NaNoWriMo novel, but I am still getting places! It is helping right now to say that I’ll write something every day, but not set a particular word count goal. So far my best day I hit 1,000 words, and my worst was around 40, but the point is that I am back to putting something more toward this story every day. I’ve got one chapter down, and working on Chapter 2, and it makes me very happy.

A secondary milestone is that, although this will technically be my third novel, it is the first I am doing deliberately, without any organized external motivation. Basically, my first novel was with NaNo, and it was awful. My second novel I wrote on my own, but it kind of became a novel by accident. I started writing a story with the “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” mentality, and several months later, I caught on that this was getting into novel territory. For a good portion of the time, I’d sit down to write wondering if today was the day the story ended. This is the first time that I’ve sat down with the thought, “I’m going to take these characters and the things I know about them and work on making their stories into a novel.” And here I am with a satisfying chunk of words, and I have a general idea of what might happen next. So far, things are good.