First of all, let me say this: I had absolutely no illusions about this stretch of the course. I was used to winning. In 2009, I won easily enough, and in 2010, it was barely a challenge to begin with. But being consistently behind on word count every single day had left me drained, defeated, and even worse—my drive to write was dwindling away.

There’s a feeling you get when you look at the vast amount of words you have to write, which is partly due to being a chronic procrastinator and partly due to life being awful to you, that makes you feel like shutting off the monitor right there, or throwing your laptop across the room in a fit of creative frustration. And most days during this week, I had that problem. Fortunately, I had no expensive equipment to throw.

My first problem was that I had too little plot for these words. The second was that I was dealing with my job, my grades, family drama and did I mention my grades? Junior year is turning out to be one of the hardest. But despite all that, I had something else.

I had motivation.

I also had the fear of being publicly embarrassed on this blog. Turns out, those are two very powerful motivators.

And, on the last day, with 6,000 words to write in five hours and the infinite distractions of the Internet facing me down, I busted through the milestone and made it to 50,000 words. The noises that came out of my mouth afterwards were in no way, shape or form human.