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?