It’s the end of Day 3 of my Q4 Writing Challenge, and I did a lot better than yesterday. Much, much better than yesterday.

I still had some errands that had to happen, but despite them, I made solid progress. I’m really liking this challenge, so I definitely think I’ll keep the form the same for future time periods. I also like the idea of doing mostly ten-week challenges with a couple 11-week ones, across the year.

So, without further ado, let’s discuss today’s progress.

Today's Word Count: 4,034
Word Count for the Week: 8,568
Remaining Word Count: 16,432

I realized I needed to add a scene, and the best place for it to be was Chapter 7. I then re-structured Chapter 8 to match and account for the new scene.

I am really enjoying this. Both the challenge itself and Tempus.

As I wrote on Saturday (I think), the primary goal of this challenge is not to write 25,000 words each week. Yes, that is the stated challenge condition… but… the intent behind the challenge is to train myself to write every day.

There was a study in Europe back in 2009 that found it takes 18 to 254 days to form a new habit, with the average being 66 days for the new behavior to become automatic (Source: Healthline and the 2009 Study).

There will be 77 days in this challenge.

I am cautiously optimistic that writing will become automatic for me by the end of the year, and I will then reinforce that new habit with rolling challenges throughout the following years.

But!

I have decided my major goal is not just writing 25,000 words (or a similar number) every week for the entire year. Oh, no. I’m also going to start teaching myself dictation. While I feel that my current pace of typing is very sustainable, I like the idea of having the additional input method that dictation represents… and that’s not even considering spoken word count versus typed word count.

Most professional narrators aim for somewhere around 9,200 to 9,300 words per hour when they narrate a story.

If I can reliably achieve even 7,000 words per hour, that will be a huge leap in production. If I reliably and consistently meet the narration rate while I’m dictating my stories, that will be huge.

In the same amount of time I wrote today, I’d produce over four times the words!

So, yeah… that’s kind of a bird’s eye view of where I’m going with all this.

I’ll be back tomorrow with another update on the challenge, so until then, I offer best wishes to you and yours.

Be safe out there.