I’ve had a busy day so far. I’ve written a thousand words, I’ve taken a walk, I’ve gone to the library, and I’ve voted. Normally, I vote on election day since my precinct is usually pretty quiet during the day, but the early voting place is at the library, and I needed books anyway, so I figured I’d get it taken care of now in case election day is rainy or I get sick. Now I don’t have to worry about it.

I tried writing before getting online this morning, and that worked pretty well. I’m not normally a morning writer, but I thought I’d give it a try. I could probably have gone on, but I needed to look up info for some of the down-ballot candidates, and I wanted to get to the polling place before people started taking lunch breaks to go vote. Next week I’ll really see how far I can get before I check in online.

I’ve discovered the feature in Scrivener that takes your due date and your word count and calculates the number of words you need to write each day, then recalculates after each day’s writing session. I’m using an arbitrary date for this draft to make sure I have enough time to tinker with it before I need to turn it in, and although the daily total I need to make that deadline is a bit higher than I usually write, it’s not higher by much, and going over my needed count for the day will drop the daily goal on subsequent days. It’s amazing how motivational that is.

Because of my early start, just hitting the usual number of words I do in an afternoon will let me go above the current target. I’m more than halfway through with this draft, and I think I have a good idea of what will happen in the rest of the story, though a new idea that will alter things somewhat struck me on my walk this morning, so I need to play with that.