October Is Locked In...But Will My Sanity (And The Weather) Stay That Way?

It's finally starting to feel like autumn as it's 67°F right now. But just because autumn is in St. Louis we can never be really sure if it's here to stay or if tomorrow summer will decide to join us again. Who knows next week it could be winter's time to visit.

I have been getting better about having a routine that isn't really at risk of burning me out and still feel like I'm being kinda productive. 100% depends on the day of the week though, I have given Wednesdays to myself to do with what I want when it comes to writing - at least until I have a day job again. And even despite the bait and switch paywall that my running tracker app tried to do to me, I think I found a way to get my running in, but also still structured. Will update when I have more of a feel for the made up plan I'm going by later.

It's a very frustrating and depressing struggle day job searching, and my self esteem is kind of starting to hang on by a thread but it does help to know I'm not completely alone and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel....somewhere....even if it is flipping me off right now.

But let's get back to some fun stuff shall we?

After getting into the habit of putting not only pumpkin spice creamer but pumpkin spice cold foam in my morning and mid morning coffee, I'm not even sure there is a real difference between the two but I have discovered that I am drinking my warm morning beverage way too fast. But it's so freaking good !!!

That being said, I'm not exactly sure if it's the coffee or if forcing myself to write down every seemly crazy idea I have for book 2, but it is coming along nicely.

My goal for every week in October is to have at least 70K+ words of a solid full draft of book 2, with weekly updates on Wednesdays (because that's when I post my blog and October also started last week so I thought that it would be easier to go from there.

Now I already had about 20k-ish words on the draft when I started but I want about 50k-ish more before I'm satisfied with it being a draft because that's what my little naïve writer brain was trained to do but more so because 20 + 50 is 70 and that works out with my word count goal. I have more detail in my last blog post but basicaly my word count is starting on October 1, and my goal for the month is to add about 50k and I had 20K ish in my draft already.

I've worked it out to about 5 weeks for the month (yes I know it's debatable but the four extra days at the top of the month threw me off so I'm just going with it). The plan is about 10k words a week, which would be about 2k words a day for 5 days. Or around 1428ish words a day for 7 days but I don't want to do that either as it feels like too much for me right now.

So to sum up:

• I have 20k-ish words in a draft already.
  

• I want 50k-ish more words in the draft to equal out to a 70k-ish* draft *based on Winter Bounds word count of 78,784 (I could go for 75k-ish but I just

  want to make it "easy" for myself right now)
  

• Word count to 50k-ish started Oct. 1 2025.
  

• I will have my weekly updates through out the month

That being said here we are for this week, I didn't quite make it in time for this post to go up, I am 2570 words shy of my 10,000 word a week for the first round but I should be able to make that up today and hopefully be able to be on track for next week.

Preptober word count status:

Goal: 50,000

Total word count for the week: 7,430

Total word count since Oct. 1: 7,430

<3's