 good morning. It is the final 48 hours of my challenge to write a book in two weeks. In fact, it's more like the final 39 hours because it's going until I go to bed tomorrow night. 6.30 a.m. I have 14,000 words to write or 13,942 words to write to be precise in two days. Let's get to it. Okay, we're two hours in. I've had two cups of tea, two hot chocolates, and we're at 3,303 words, which is excellent after the last couple of days. That brings my average words per minute to about 27 words. I'm feeling more optimistic about the word count goal now. So this means I've got, I'm almost halfway to my goal for today. So I've got another 3,700 words to hit 7,000 words for today, which given that it's not even nine o'clock yet, I feel like it's doable. The main question is, can I keep up this pace? And if I can keep up this pace, could I potentially do more than my 14,000 words that maybe even finish this book? Now, the reason I've been moving so quickly is because I was in sort of a training slash fight scene, and I do find action scenes much easier to write. I also have my battle music playlist going on in the background, which is mostly Final Fantasy music. So that really helps push me along. The danger is that I get so stuck in these fight scenes that I spend my entire word count on those, and I don't actually move forward with the story. So I do want to finish the current sequence. I think I've probably got another one to 2,000 words to go, and then hopefully I can spend the rest of today's words on progressing the story a little bit more. So now I'm going to take a shower break and then back to writing. I've been writing for another 45 minutes, and I've got about another 1,200 words, so we're sitting at 4,500 words of the day. Because it was 45 minutes, my pace is still quite good. I think it's around 26 words a minute, but I'm also at the point where it's like, feel like this is about to slow down, because I basically got to the end of the previous sequence, and now I've got a conversation that I wrote earlier which, I don't know, I can flesh it out. See, this is the problem with skipping ahead to write things later in the book, because you get there, and you're like, maybe I don't need that much. So now I'm actually quite hungry, so I'm going to get some breakfast, and then I'll look at this next scene that I've already written and see if it needs to be fleshed out, or if I'm removing it. After that, the big challenge is that I finished this scene that I was inspired to do, so I've got to figure out the next one. This brings me into the same territory where I was yesterday, where it's more work in the lab, and I'm not sure what they're working on, or how things are going to work. So I have a feeling things might slow down from here, but it's quarter past 10, I've still got a lot of time left in the day. I'm feeling fairly optimistic about hitting today's target. I was feeling better after the first session where it's like, oh, 3,300 words. Maybe I could do the whole 14,000 words today. Now things are slowing down, like maybe I can't do the whole 14,000 words today, but I think there's hope to get the 14,000 words done this weekend. So going to be taking a slightly longer break than expected, because I had a package scheduled to be sent with Sendal on Thursday. Didn't collect on Thursday, so rescheduled to Friday. Didn't collect it on Friday. Now it's going to happen on Monday, and I have no assurance that it'll actually get picked up, so I've just cancelled it. Now I'm heading to the post office. Given that my pace was slowing down, it's probably good to have a little bit of a longer break, and then when I get back, I can just get right back into it. And here we come to the real reason for making a D2R, which is to pick up some chocolate. The package has been sent. Motivation chocolate has been acquired, and I'm back and ready to start writing. And if you noticed it got darker in here, it's because it's going to be a hot day today, so we've got the shade lines down outside. Now I'm heading into this next session with a lot of trepidation, because I did finish the last scene. I'm not sure what to do next, and I'm not sure how many words I'll get out of what's next. And what's annoying is that if I hadn't missed Thursday and Friday, I would already be done for the day. Like four and a half thousand words was more than I needed to get done in a day. But now, because I lost those days, I'm making up for lost time. So I just don't know how many words I have left in me for today, but it's only one way to find out. It's been another hour and 15 minutes, another 1200 words. I'm definitely starting to feel the fatigue, and you can see that in my word counts, because that session ended up being just under 17 words a minute. So, you know, I started at 27 words a minute. Now it's dropped by 10 words a minute. On one hand, like, I'm going well, I'm on track, because that session at the beginning of the day went so well. But on the other, I'm just worried about running out of stuff to write, because this part of the book is just not planned that well. So I'm at 5,000, about 5,700 words for the day. So I think, yes, I can hit the 7,000 words. It's only 1,300 words to go. But I'm feeling a bit tired. So I'm going to take a break now and try to focus more on doing some outlining, both for what I need to write today as well as what I need to write tomorrow. Because, yeah, tomorrow, I mean, I could get to the final battle scene, which would be great. But if I don't, then I don't think like there's any way I could get to my word count target. It is 3.55 and someone has just hit her writing goal for the day, so I'm sitting at 7,061 words. I ended up having a two hour break where I did nothing book related, like I watched a movie on Netflix and had another hot chocolate because hot chocolate is life. I had some other real chocolate I bought earlier because chocolate is also life. And yeah, 3.10, I got back and I was in one of the lab scenes that I mentioned I was having trouble with and I thought, okay, I'm just going to write and see what happens. And we went to the cafeteria and met like a new cast of characters. Yeah, 1,282 words, which is up at 28 words a minute. So that's actually the most efficient writing time I've had today. So that brings my total for the day up to 7,061 words, which means I've got a little bit less than 7,000 words to do tomorrow in order to hit my goal. So this is my challenge tracker. The gray line is what I'm meant to be doing. It's how it would have looked if I did an equal number of words every day. The yellow line is how I've actually tracked. And across the bottom here, the blue lines are the average amount of words per day, which was 3,750. And the orange ones are what I actually did. So what you can see here is we've got a horizontal bit around here. This was on the 30th of December when I did nothing. So lost a bit of progress and then caught up. And then we've got the last couple of days where I had one with no progress and one with very little. It was 849 words. So now I'm going to add my 7,061 and look. So that is looking much healthier. Now, because it's so early in the day, I could keep working. It's 4pm. I usually go to bed around 9 on 9.30 because I'm a toddler. So I have up to five more hours when I could write more content. And I am going to keep working on the book now. But the best thing about having hit the word count target is it takes the pressure off the rest of the day. So it means I can work on outlining. Like I said, I was going to earlier. I can work on outlining without worrying that it's taking up my writing time because I've done what I wanted to do today. So my plans for the rest of the day are I want to map out the rest of this sequence of scenes. Basically, the progression I want is we get into a situation where it looks like the character has gotten everything she wanted. She's living her dream. Everything's awesome. And then there's a turn when she discovers the antagonist dastardly plan. And that then sets in motion all the pieces for the epic final battle of the book. There are two challenges. One is the lab stuff that I've mentioned. The other one is that I don't know what the antagonist dastardly plan is yet. Like I know it's going to be something big and bad. It needs to be something bigger and better than anything he's done earlier in the book or in book one because yeah, it's the ultimate climax. So I'm having trouble thinking of what it might be. I think that's going to be my focus this afternoon. And if I can crack that, and if I crack it soon, like in the next two hours, then I already have like the moment of discovery. So oh my god, you're bad. And what happens after I just don't know what the oh my god, your bad moment actually is. So if I figure out what it's going to be, then I might actually write that bit today. And if I do that, that means tomorrow I can probably do a bit of the final battle scene. And if I get into the final battle scene tomorrow, then I think I can hit the word count because battle scenes tend to move very quickly for me. So fingers crossed. It is the final day of my challenge. I did do some extra writing yesterday, so I ended up with about 8,400 words. So that means today I've got about, I've got five and a half thousand and some change left to do. So that feels much more doable than yesterday from a word count perspective. The challenge is I still am not completely sure of what the villain's dastardly plan is. And this is like where I'm up to is I either need to write the reveal or I need to jump ahead to the final battle scene. And both of those are problematic because don't know what the dastardly plan is. I do have some ideas. I just need to think of a way to make it work with what he already did in the first book. And then for the final battle scene, I need to choreograph it because it's in like an underground facility. There are a lot of people on both sides. Not everyone's an active fighter, but there are a lot of bodies to just coordinate and get out of the way. Yeah, there's no fast route into these five and a half thousand words. And I do wish, I do wish today wasn't the last day, I do wish I had more time to think about it. But it doesn't matter what I wish because today's the last day and we're writing five and a half thousand words. It's been an hour and a half. I've got 2,300 words or so. So that means I've got about 3,300 left to go. I mean, it's going well. I'm getting the words out. I think I can get the words out, but I'm having one of those frustrating experiences where more words are ending up on the page, but I'm not getting further through the story. Like I thought I was about to go into the reveal and then I'm like, no, let's link together some of the different things I've written. So I'm like earlier in the book than I was yesterday, even though words are getting added. So yeah, I don't know how far I'm going to get. My goal is still like obviously I'm not going to finish the book, not in the next 3,000 or so words, but also not today. I do need more time. But my goal is to get to the final battle scene because I feel like once you're on the threshold before the final battle, the book is basically done. Like yes, there's choreography, there's a big show stopping scene and everything, but the reason that scene is powerful is because of all of the seeds you've planted before that and everything you've set up before then, which you know, all either comes to fruition or comes crashing down in that final battle. So I feel like when I get to that point, yes, there'll be another 10,000 words or so to write, but the book will mostly be done. I would be comfortable putting it down, which I have to because I've got to go through powerless one again before copy edits. So I would be comfortable putting it down at that point and be happy returning to it like in a few weeks or a few months depending on how things play out. So 3,000 words to go. Let's see if I can come up with the dastardly plan, but let's see if I can reveal the dastardly plan, have the confrontation there and then have the trigger for the final epic battle. This is a final stretch check-in that I have hit 4,186 words for the day, which means I'm down to 1,376 words to go. I am at 58,624 words for this challenge. So yes, we are going to hit the 60,000 words. No, we are not going to finish the book, but we are going to hit the word count. So yeah, I'm going to do this last 1,300 words and then I will check in and see how much mental energy I have for the rest of the day before this challenge officially closes. Guess who hit 60,000 words? So precisely, 60,183 words. So I did that part of the challenge ahead of my target. I did not get through as much of the book as I expected. In fact, I did not move forward at all because I was, like I mentioned earlier, I was linking between different scenes and I got to the end of the one before like the downfall scene when we get the big bad discovery and I needed some linking to transition between the previous scene and the one I had planned. And so I started the transitioning and then that turned into a complete chapter in its own right. So my last, I don't remember how many words I had left when I last checked in, but the last 3,000 words ended up being this brand new chapter that was not planned that I think is quite good. It is going to stay in the book. But it means I hit my 60,000 words and I'm still not at the point where we discover the villain's dastardly plan. So it's only coming up to 1pm now. It means I do have a lot of the day left. So I'm going to keep going. So now I'm going to figure out the villain's dastardly plan so I can reveal it and maybe get another couple of thousand words in. We'll see how it goes. It is the 11th of January, so it's been a couple of days since the challenge ended and let's recap how I did. But first let's start with the goals I had at the beginning of the challenge. So there were three different goals. The first one was figuring out where the powerless would have a sequel. The second one was drafting said sequel. So doing a complete first draft in my two week slow period over the holidays. And the third goal was doing 60,000 words. So the idea was I already had 10,000 words in a document. If I did another 60, the combined 70,000 words should be a complete first draft. How did I do? Let's work backwards. So goal 3 was hit 60,000 words which I did. After the last clip I filmed I did do a little bit more writing. So the final word count at the end of the challenge was 60,813 words. Over the 16 day period that worked out to an average of 3,800 words a day or if I just count the 14 days where I actually wrote because I had two days where I wrote nothing. The average words per day was 4,343 words which I think is pretty good. If we step back up to the next goal, so finish the first draft, I did not successfully achieve that. In fact, even when I adjusted that in the days before the challenge finished and I had a new goal of getting up to the final battle scene, I also didn't get to that point. I was one scene short. I needed to have the confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist where she discovers the plan he's been hiding and that then leads to the final battle kicking off and I probably could have gone there. I could have pushed for it but I still wasn't clear on what his plan was and I did have a rough idea but given that I wasn't 100% sure, it didn't really make sense to just write something to have something. I thought given that I had hit the 60,000 word goal it would make sense to just leave this for a couple of weeks and come back to it and do something that was a bit more coherent and intentional. So did not hit my goal of writing the full book. The final goal, the big one which was the reason for doing all this was is powerless going to have a sequel? What I wanted to happen was I would do a full first draft and it would still be a first draft. It would need work that I'd be in a similar position to where I was when I finished powerless where I would know that I had something that I thought I could turn into a good book. Where I am now is I don't have a full draft and what I do have I'm not that confident in. I think it does need a lot more work than powerless one did and I think one of the big reasons for that is because I was working in a compressed timeframe that means I didn't get the chance to go back and review what I'd written which in reflection is something I've discovered that I like to do when I do a first draft like a couple of times in the book I would go back and review the previous. Basically since the previous time I reviewed it so usually the previous 20-25% and polish a little bit which helps me get into the flow for the next chunk of the book and I didn't have the opportunity to do that with powerless too. I think that's actually a good thing in hindsight because if I'd done that I think I would have just gotten really frustrated. I think I would have really struggled to bring that sense of polish and generate that sense of momentum when I was jumping back and forth between different viewpoints and that would have stopped me from making progress so it almost ended up being a good thing that I didn't go back and do that work because I was forced to just keep writing blind almost. So I'm in the position where I have a first draft that is far rougher than I'd like it to be and it does need a lot of work to turn into the finished product but I do have more confidence that I can do a sequel now. Given what I have like what I ended up with at the end of the two week period I don't think the sequel will come out as early as I hoped. Like I was really hoping I could have powerless come out in June and the sequel come out in December before Christmas and I don't think that's realistic given the shape it's in but I do think I could get it like if I had 18 months maybe so if we take it to June 2024 I do think that would be enough time to get it into a good shape. I'm not sure what that shape will be. I do think the key moments of the book are going to still be the same but there are some big questions like is it going to be a single point of view book or a dual point of view book as I've currently written it and I'm not sure. So for that goal I do think it was achieved. Yes I've decided that powerless will have a sequel that means I don't need to go and make significant changes to powerless before I send it to copy edits next week. The caveat is just that the sequel might end up being quite different to what I've written. Aside from achieving two out of my three goals what are my thoughts on this experiment? Well I'm actually really glad I did it. I was a bit worried heading into it that I was courting burnout. I think I mentioned at the beginning of this video that the reason I haven't been around is because I got burnt out in 2022 and I'm still in the process of recovering from that. I can't push myself as much as I used to without really feeling it like if I get to the end of my energy that's something that could take weeks to recover from rather than a couple of days so I was really worried that pushing myself over these two weeks would lead to something like that where I was feeling the debt for the next month and was useless for the next month which is obviously not what I want to do because I want to keep writing and keep making progress. So I'm pleasantly surprised to say that I actually feel good. I feel better than when I did NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2019 because then I had a bit of a hangover at the end. I woke up on Monday and thought I could continue working on the book not as much as I had in the last couple of weeks because work is fully back now but I felt like I could continue making progress and that was really exciting. I also felt excited about continuing to work on this book so for this week I have a forced break because I do need to look at the first book before copy edits but from next week I'm planning to pick it up again. I would like to have this confrontation, do a first draft of the final battle scene, we'll just finish the first draft before I put it aside whereas at the beginning of the challenge I wasn't sure if I would just get to the end of this two weeks and put it aside to work on the next thing and revisit it later this year so energetically I feel good when it comes to enthusiasm for the project. I feel really good so from that perspective I think it was a good way to push myself. I also feel like it was a good way to get back into writing because I haven't been writing consistently for the last two years. I've been seizing many opportunities to write when I've had like long weekends or holidays but I found it very hard to balance my writing with my life when I was in my last job. Now obviously the last two weeks isn't a good example of how to balance my writing with my life because it wasn't my normal life, it was a slow period but I think having that little bit of an intense challenge to get back into it has helped pave the way to have more balance going forward and once I send powerless in for copy edits I'm really curious to see how I balance writing with work. Now I am very fortunate to be working four days a week now so I do have three full days that I could dedicate to writing a week but potentially I could also be doing some writing around my working hours and the best thing about this is that I feel like I have the foundation to do now. I feel like physically and energetically I have that foundation but also from like a writing momentum standpoint even though I didn't finish this draft and momentum was one of the things I struggled with like building momentum I do feel like as a writer getting used to the act of writing like I built that sort of momentum so all in all I think this was a really positive challenge. I'm also quite proud of myself because I don't think I've ever written that much fiction in such a condensed space. I've successfully done nanorimos but that was about 54,000 words over 30 days. It wasn't 60,000 words in 16 so this was basically two nanorimos so it's just really cool to know that's possible and hopefully as I become a more proficient writer I'll be able to do better work in these sorts of challenges rather than just getting the words down but knowing they'll need to be revived heavily. So what are the next steps from here? Well as I've mentioned a number of times powerless is due at my copy editor next Monday so I do need to go through it one more time before sending it to the copy editor so that is the focus for this week. From next week I am going back to powerless too I do want to finish the first draft and after that I do have another project that I started writing in October and I had to put on hold and I'm looking forward to getting back into that so lots of exciting things ahead. I think 2023 is going to be a great year I'm very optimistic about the year ahead and I hope you are too. That is it for this challenge I hope you enjoyed the video if you did like, subscribe, comment do all of the things that keep the gods of YouTube happy and I'll see you next time. Bye!