Susanne Winter

Yeah. There you can see that motivation alone is not enough.

It’s not that I had a bad day, it was rather mixed. I knew that aiming for 8,000 words was somewhat ambtious, but I didn’t think I’d end up with a mere 3,500. Boo.

I knew that I wouldn’t have time to write in the morning but I secretly hoped that I would be able to sneak in a thousand words or so. Of course this was the day that I lounged in bed until the ungodly hour of 7.30, and didn’t even manage to meditate before the rest of the family got up.

My 11K run went really well but then lunch was extremely late by our standards. And I hadn’t planned for calling a friend on the phone for her birthday. I should have, though, because that friend is important.

I only started writing at 4 pm, and then had trouble getting into the story. I did write a bit of the „main character at the mercy of the murderer“-scene, though. This is something new I’m trying. I’ve always strictly written from beginning to end, and this time when I’m stuck I just continue writing the end. And then I get a better sense of where to move the story next. That might mean heavy revision on the end but I don’t mind. I’m mostly pantsing this anyways which will mean quite a bit of editing.

So now it’s an hour until bedtime. I still have 4,500 words to write today which is highly unlikely. I don’t want to go to bed way too late.

I can still put an hour in and make some more progress.

And I’m still detemined to reach 50K until the end of the month.

Yesterday was so busy that I didn’t even manage to write my daily post before wifi was turned off.

But I did manage the 2,000 words I wanted, in fact I even wrote 1,776 more, and am now past 30,000. Which is pretty good.

I worked all aftenroon, and I cleaned the house, and I made pizza from scratch, and I watched somet TV with my son, so I’m rather happy with how that went.

Tomorrow is the day that I will attempt to write 10,000 words plus run 11 kilometers. Not at the sam time, though. That would be truly impressive.

That plan is to do some writing in the early morning, then the running, then lunch, and then a lot of writing. I already told my son that I’m too busy this weekend to cut his hair.

10,000 words would be extremely awesome, I’ve never written that much in a day. I remember back in 2006 when I had one day where I wrote 5,000 words and afterwards I felt like my head would implode. I’m comparing that to yesterday where I wrote 5,000 words and felt like I had worked hard but could easily have written a bit more.

I’m really excited about this. Which is a bit silly.

I am so stoked today that I’m posting early.

I had a hard look at my chances to „win“ NaNo this year yesterday, and as I might have told you it was not looking good. I was at around 22,000 words with a bad track record of wasting precious writing time (like I did yesterday), and these days not only are my days quite full, I’m also developing a habit of falling asleep while typing around 8.30 pm.

November lasts until next Thursday, and looking at my calendar I found that it would be highly unlikely I’d write anything on Monday and Tuesday. And while the 3,800 words per day that I would have needed to make it sounded doable if strenuous on paper I was barely eeking out 2,000 per day. Which is still a good number of written words, it is just not enough this year for me.

So I thought. There were 27,000 words left to write. If I could write 5,000 today, Saturday and Sunday, that would still leave 12,000 words for three days. Which is a bit too much. I thought about giving up. I always do. I mean, this isn’t really about winning or losing, this is about writing a novel all the way through the end and having fun in November. And 50K will not be enough to finish this novel anyway.

Also in the past writing the 50K mostly left me so burned out that I wouldn’t write a single word for the rest of the year. I definitely don’t want that.

Still.

I have „won“ NaNo every single year that I have attempted it.

So I made a plan.

It is a bit nuts but then that was to be expected.

The plan is to write 5,000 words (or more) today, 2,000 (or more) tomorrow, and 10,000 each on Saturday and Sunday.

If I don’t manage the 10,000 I will still have a few more days to make up for it.

So the first test was to attempt 5K today.

I only worked for half an hour so even with general household chores and running and such that left a good chunk of time for writing. So I don’t usually manage to make use of those stretches of time but today would be different. I was very determined.

So I got out my pomodoro timer app, and I started writing. Looks like I can usually write about 1,100 words in 25 minutes.

So not only did I get over the halfway mark today, I also wrote 5,102 words. Ha!

I’m mightily pleased.

The plan is still pretty nuts, though. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

Today’s unused stretches of potential writing time:

5.30 am – 6.30 am: woke up unable to fall asleep again; had left my computer in the kitchen and read a book instead of writing

7.30 am – 8.30 am: wrote a blog post for my other blog, read a book (I’m reading an ARC of „Amber Fang 2“ by Arthur Slade and it’s really good), looked at the internet

10.00 am – 10.30 am: sat at the kitchen table and crocheted while my son was having breakfast

12.30 am – 1.00 pm: kept my husband company while he cooked

1.30 pm – 3.00 pm: more reading, got a package ready for mailing, freaked out about something work-related without reason, more internet

6.45 pm – 7.45 pm: more reading, waiting for my husband to have dinner (turned out he already had eaten), more internet

Total word count so far: 102 words written in three minutes just before my husband showed up for breakfast.

I have now put a beer in the freezer. I have to write until it’s cold enough to drink.

Two hours until bedtime. Will I manage to write 3,400 more words until then?

Stay tuned.

Phew.

Today I wrote 3,604 words. I am now at 21,557. (And no, the NaNo widget in the sidebar does not show the right wordcount. I actually fiddled with it for half an hour or so, and didn’t get it to work, sorry.)

I woke up at 5, started writing at 5.30, and wrote ten minutes here and ten minutes there all throughout the day. I didn’t really feel like it but then that’s part of the deal. I can tell when I’m feeling fatigued while writing because there’s a lot of talk about cake then. I might have to edit some of that out later.

The other thing I managed was I installed a thingy where you can subscribe to my mailing list. I definitely won’t spam anyone, and I won’t send you a ton of emails, just in case that you’re interested in hearing about my books coming out or similar stuff you can sign up.

The whole setup is still pretty basic – well, I set it up in a short work break today, no fancy design – but at least there is a setup.

So I’d love it if you would sign up for that, of course.

Funny how the whole NaNo-thing looks a little more doable, only because I managed to not fall more behind once.

As I said – I am an optimist.

I wrote every chance I got but I had a pretty busy day. I’m also writing this the morning after because I thought writing the novel was more important than writing the blog post.

All in all I only wrote 1,503 words yesterday. About 900 of them I wrote throughout the day every chance I got, and the rest at night after dinner. I was so tired that I almost fell asleep while typing yet again, so I called it a night at 9 pm, and went to sleep. I did wake up at 5 and wrote a little more since then.

I hope that today I’m a little less busy and there will be more time to write. It’s also getting clear that whatever health issue is making me all tired all the time is seriously messing with my writing. And doesn’t mesh with me trying to write 50,000 words in 20 days.

I am pretty happy with what I’m writing, though, so that’s something.