So, deadline confirmed. It’s brilliant news and I’ll talk about why at a later date. In the interim, time to get off my ass.

Some writers will look at this challenge and laugh. They can bust out 10,000 words daily without breaking a sweat. Those words will also be tantamount to drivel, but hey, like any good ticket cop, quota met.

I tend to average between 1,000-2,000 words daily. The only problem, as noted in a previous post, is that I like to write in the mornings and afternoons. But hard to conjure words when you have a job to do five days per week and a weekend schedule that trivializes your weekday one.

So, nights.

Good news is that I work best under deadlines. No excuses. Just gotta do it, and my underdeveloped brain seems to embrace the challenge.

Night 1: 1,200 words written by 10:10 p.m. Took me about an hour and a half. Pretty good given that a lot of story and dialog went into this particular section of work. Writing a blog post like this one takes a couple minutes, but try penning the equivalent in a narrative without transforming the project into a steaming pile of dog shit.

Not as easy.

At this rate, I shouldn’t run into many speed bumps in my pilgrimage toward 25,000 words. Which, by the way, will push Sophistication well past the 100,000-word mark–and that’ll make it Dead Weight-esque in size. Bigger, probably. But the better news is that my commander-in-chief (AKA, wife) has already given me the thumbs-up to take five days away in a secluded hotel room and spend 10-hour shifts focused on the book. With that amount of time, I should be able to knock out 5,000 words per day. Multiply that by five days and you get 25,000 words. On top of the 20 others, each of which should allow me 1,000 words nightly.

Lots of words, basically. So unless I really fuck this up, should be doable. More than doable. And yet I’m nervous, anyway, because there’s a lot riding on it.