I've been writing for a gift for my friends. How do you get the motivation to keep going. I'm 60k words in and every thousand is such a slog
To be honest, my motivation is to keep having fun! Writing something I enjoy doesn't feel like a slog to me, and if it starts to, that's usually a sign that something's wrong. Either I'm in a bad state of mind for it, or something's not working about what I'm writing. Maybe I need to start a chapter over, or maybe I'm writing something I don't really enjoy and therefore I have to re-work what I'm doing to get back to writing the kinds of things I do enjoy.
Sometimes chapters are less fun than others - every fic I write has chapters that I've envisioned since the start of the fic and can't wait to get to, but to get there, sometimes I need to write the in-between parts that I'm not as excited about but are necessary for the story to make sense. So my motivation there is to keep writing to get to the parts I'm looking forward to.
In this case, you're writing a gift for your friends (which is incredible!!!! That's such a lovely gift!!!!!!) It sounds like you're not enjoying the process at this point though, so is there anything you can do to realign it to your interests? Can you include any tropes that interest you? Can you focus more on the characters that interest you?
Also, 60k is a lot of words! Is there a specific number you're looking to reach, or can you start wrapping the story up! 60k is a huge achievement on its own!