1000 Words of Summer 2026
This was my ninth 1000 Words of Summer and the toughest yet, but we’re not here to be hard on ourselves! It’s hard enough to write books!
I got around ten thousand words instead of the fourteen thousand I was aiming for, but I kept up my daily practice, so I’m happy with it. Life was a little crazy during this particular fourteen-day stretch. I wrote a thousand words on a train, a thousand words on a plane, a thousand words in a car. A thousand words in Philadelphia, a thousand words in Brooklyn, a thousand words in Rockford.
The busyness is not entirely the reason my thousand words dropped off. I lost steam because I felt like I was adding words to the novel manuscript just to add them, when really it’s so close to being done that, after a certain point, I was just making more cleanup work for myself. Some of what I wrote is workable, but I knew when it stopped being that way, so I slowed down. I could have switched to a different project for the last few days, but that is something I don’t have the brain space for right now. And that’s okay!
My plan now is read the ten thousand words I wrote during 1000 Words of Summer, mercilessly cut the junk, and work anything I like into the manuscript. (I was generating in a “working” folder so I didn’t have to worry about order.) Then try to wrap this thing by the end of the summer.
One important thing I got out of this 1000 Words: I wrote the end. I’d been hesitant to write the end because I’m still not sure about the final scenes that lead up to it, but I do think knowing that last image I’m writing toward will help me get there.
The manuscript is almost done. I’ll be in Illinois a lot this summer. Will I finish it in Brooklyn or in Rockford? It would be nice to finish my Rockford novel in the place I’ve been writing about all these years.
Speaking of Illinois
I’ll be reading from Leave at the Mom Brain reading series at Little Gems in Evanston on Friday, August 14 at 10am, if you happen to be in the Chicago area. This daytime reading series is for caregivers and their little ones!
If you did 1000 Words of Summer, congrats! We made it.
Love,
Shayne