I'm hearing those voices again

Total word count: about 45,000
Today's word count: about 2,000 words. This is a little misleading because I've also been reworking a lot of stuff, which means that I've been cutting as much as I've been writing.
Cups of coffee: four
What's playing: Tracy Chapman

It has been a good morning, for the most part, although I'm still working on a couple of different chapters in different documents and have a lot of gaps to fill in earlier on in the story. I also haven't formatted everything properly yet, which I need to do before I send the next lot of pages to my advisor. It's been a month since I last saw him. I can't believe how quickly those four weeks have gone.

I guess I'm almost half-way through the first draft of the book, if I'm aiming for a length between 80 and 100 thousand words. I started work properly in the second week of January, so it's been six weeks of working on this full-time. Ideally I would like to have the first draft completed (but not necessarily looked over or edited at all yet) by the end of March, just for peace of mind. That would give me almost a year to revise, edit and rewrite and get it up to a publishable standard. I hope I'm going in the right direction with it - it worries me when there are gaps, since I used to write so chronologically.

One thing I have really learned in the last few weeks is that things are achieved a little bit at a time. Sounds obvious, right? Sometimes a task can look so daunting that I don't start it at all - but with this project I've just kept on working steadily every day, and I'm nearly halfway through. In the past I also used to get really bogged down in self-judgement. My inner critic, who wanted everything to be done perfectly the first time, would berate me as I was writing ('this isn't any good, you might as well give up now, it'll never get published, blah blah'). I feel like I have kind of been writing this novel while looking the other way, kind of pretending that I'm not doing it, so as not to attract the attention of the inner critic. On the occasions he does notice what I'm doing and starts with his usual chorus of 'this is crap', I just reply (mentally, I'm not that bad yet), 'that's fine, I'll just keep going anyway.' And look what we have as a result - half a novel. Hurrah!

Yes, well, back to work.