Did I fail my November writing challenge?

Happy December! I'm just going to dive right in and tell you the results of my November writing challenge (if you didn't read that post you can find it here). To recap, my goal had two parts: write 50K and finish the first draft of the book I was working on. I went into the month thinking I'd need to write over 50K to finish the draft but boy was I wrong.

Did I write 50K in November? Nope. I did not. Shocking I know. I ended up writing 38,338 words. I wanted to write the last 12K-ish words, I really did but the week of Thanksgiving I started feeling the beginning of burn out and rather than push myself to finish I decided to end my challenge at just over 38K words. I probably could have done it but I needed to be able to start the edits of Blue Line (my next book coming out Spring 2026 - find out more information here) on December 1st and didn't want to risk being burnt out so I chose to stop writing for the month. Which now that it's December I can say that was such a great choice and I'm happy that I was able to recognize that and not push myself. In the past I probably would have just pushed through the burnout and than pushed through December and I know I would have ended up even more drained and burned out come January.

Did I finish the first draft? Yes. I did actually. The first draft ended up being 62,471 (if you remember I started the month with quite a few words already written). The draft is messy as heck, there are scenes I skipped or didn't write completely, it's and the ending is all over the place. But I just decided to call the first draft done where it was, not only because I was starting to feel burnt out but because I knew there was a lot early on in the book I wanted to change which would impact the ending.

Am I happy with how November went? Yes. 100% yes. I really just wanted to finish the first draft and honestly didn't care how many words I wrote. So to have it finished - even if it needs a lot of editing is awesome.

Until next time,

Marissa