What did that entail? A ton of yardwork, deep cleaning, sorting our possessions and deciding which ones go to the dump and which stays with us in the trip to the next house, carrying heavy things up narrow basement stairwells or down the other twisting stairwell, working outside in the surprisingly cold wind, and driving loads to the dump and emptying them. I'm sure I left a lot out too.
Each night, I had a really difficult time sitting down to write my words. I was so tired that I could barely keep my eyes open, much less write a story. And it was a challenging portion of the book too, so it took thought, and I could barely muster any.
After the road trip on Sunday, we worked the whole day Monday. We rented a trailer from U-Haul, and had to get our money's worth. So, we went to Ikea to pick up a new mattress for our bed, the dump to unload the old mattress (along with several other things we were done with), and then loaded fifty bags of black mulch into the trailer for the yard work planned for the next day.
That night, I could barely write. I checked the word count every few minutes, hoping I was almost there. It was well past midnight when I finally made it to 1,047, and could go to bed. Two days in a row without achieving my goal of finishing my words before 11:00 PM. But it was going to get worse.
Tuesday was the longest day of them all. We worked in the yard for probably eight hours. I was so tired by the end of the night, that I just about forgot to write my words. I went upstairs to take a shower before going to bed, and as I was getting in, I remembered that I still had to write. I didn't know what to do, because I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't even stand in the shower. My wife has a plastic footstool that she keeps in the shower to rest her feet on when she shaves her legs, and I knelt down and lay over that thing while the water splashed on my back because I couldn't stay on my feet any longer.
In the end, I just didn't write. It's the first time in two months that I've missed a day, and I felt like a complete failure for doing it, but I just couldn't help it. My streak ended at sixty-two days in a row.
It's funny, because my wife is not very into my writing. I don't think she even knew that I was trying to write every day until I'd been doing it for more than a month. So, when I told her that I hadn't written on Tuesday, I was surprised when she told me that I had to work extra hard Wednesday, and do 2,000 words to make up for it. I think maybe she felt a little guilty for working me beyond my ability to do those words the day before.
So, on Wednesday, we knocked off the house work a little earlier, and she watched Netflix while I flailed away at Sunny & Gray. But it worked. I got 2,151 words written that night. It made up for the night before, and was a record total for me in all this time.
Since then, I haven't missed again, despite being very tired each night. On Thursday, I got 1,267 and today I got 1,409. I'm going to have to step it up at some point, because I said I would do 40,000 words this month. That means that I actually need to do 1,3333 words a day. I haven't hit that much so far, which means I actually need to do something like 1,500 or more from here on out. We shall see what I can do.
I guess I ought to get back to it.
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