Cool Air, Warmer Pages: Hitting 50,000 Words

This week’s writing update didn’t start with the page. It started with the weather. A cool, shifting September day in Illinois — sun at 61°F in the morning, warming into the mid-60s by afternoon, slipping back into the 50s by night. Even from my desk, I could feel that rhythm, sunlight moving across the walls, the promise of a cooler walk later. That rhythm mirrored how writing often feels to me: not dramatic, but changing, ambient, alive.

Word Count Update

• Starting point today: 46,162 words

• Today’s final count: 50,063 words

• Progress so far: +3,901 words

• Distance to goal (60,000): 9,937 words left

That’s not just numbers on a page. It’s proof that this climb is real, and that each week brings me closer to the finish line.

Then came the lingering thought: Dante’s Harbor, the town I’ve been building for another project. If it ever got optioned, where would it be filmed? Nova Scotia, with its tax breaks and rocky harbors? Oregon or Washington, with mist and pines? Massachusetts, authentic and salt-worn? Or even Wilmington, North Carolina — “Hollywood East,” where Dawson’s Creek gave us Capeside and The Crow gave us gothic shadows. It’s not my choice, of course; authors don’t get to pick filming locations. That’s production budgets and logistics. Still, it’s one of those thoughts that hovers: wherever the cameras go, the town on the page is always mine to define.

That push and pull — between what’s mine and what isn’t, what’s chosen and what’s imposed — is the same tension I feel with language. Growing up, desire was sketched in bluntness. Skinemax on late-night TV, pirated porn files on Kazaa and Morpheus. Porn or porn-adjacent material was easier to find than poetry. And for a while, that was the vocabulary of desire available to me.

But here’s the truth: that vocabulary doesn’t own me. Between me and my deadname, there’s a gap I keep filling with sentences. Every line I craft today is proof that I can write past the obvious. Flexing my prosaic muscles isn’t just craft; it’s survival, it’s defiance, it’s creation. Porn taught me bluntness: “She orgasmed with his penis inside her.” Writing taught me how to bend bluntness into something lasting, something that breathes: recognition, dread, tenderness. Language that holds more than skin and climax.

So I wander between the two worlds — the easy download and the sentence that takes more of me, but gives more back. The screen versus the page. The blunt versus the alive.

This post, then, isn’t just about words gained. It’s about drift. From weather to wandering thoughts, from Skinemax to sentences. From a past that taught me one kind of vocabulary to a present that insists on another.

What I chase now isn’t the easy download. It’s the line that lives. The sentence that outlasts the moment. And every time I push away from the obvious, I pull closer to the voice that’s been waiting all along.

—A.L. Bellettiere