We did it everyone. Pillowrimo is complete. And I am happy to report a big success! We're ending the month at 52, 244 words. Not only did I manage to lock in every day, but I also blasted past 50k (a goal I wasn't sure I was going to meet in the first place). Needless to say I am pleased with the results.

Here's the stats: A Trackbear.app graph of my writing progress over the month. The red line increases in line with the predicted average. A breakdown of my word count every day over the last 30 days.

I had a lot of fun doing the challenge. I'd been out of habit writing for a while and feeling very demotivated about it. It looks like the cure really is 'write a sentence every day', which is tragic news for procrastinators everywhere. Many of the days when I was dragging myself to the keyboard to write 5 words, ended up being the days where I hit 4000+ words. Sometimes not even out of inspiration, but out of the freedom of writing a bunch of nonsense that I'll have to pick through and understand later. As long as it was words on the doc, it counted.

I hit it completely on accident, after locking in on a particularly juicy section of the story. Then, the words per day really dropped off afterwards. It was only three days before the deadline so I just needed to write enough words to check off the habit every day, fully coasting to the end of the month.

I remembered why I like writing so much. I went through some difficult stuff this month and losing myself in my own world for a couple hours did a lot to bring me comfort. I remember why I love these characters, and why I want to tell this story to myself.

I am, however, having some difficulty in getting it to take the shape that I want. I think I'm having the reverse problem now, and in my month of writing I haven't really been reading anything. In reponse, I'm going to try and spend this month reading every day instead. I have a very long list of books to read so I am spoiled for choice. Unfortunately this month is December, so there are some pretty big roadblocks to get in the way of that goal. I will be kind to myself, the goal is just a vector to increase my reading and get some new ideas into my brain. I won't fail reading if I don't do it every day (affirmations to keep the perfectionism demons at bay).

I will definitely take part in the challenge again next year, and may be looking out for other challenges to do in the meantime. I liked the feeling of doing something with everyone, and looking at the shared graph to see the progress we were making was the highlight of many writing days.