Susanne Winter

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.

So yesterday I only manged about 1,000 words. I was sure I would make up for it today.

Today I had one of those days.

First I got myself a new video game. Yes, I know that’s dumb.

Every time I sat down for write someone was coming into the room I was sitting in and wanted to talk to me.

I spent all afternoon finishing our son’s room. The good news is that the furniture is all done now. We only need to move all his things into it. It looks really nice with all that new furniture, and the new floor, and the freshly painted walls.

Ninety more minutes until bedtime. I can totally do 3,000 words until then, can I?

The good news is that I actually managed to write a little more than 3,000 words yesterday. I also changed my blog’s theme, and now I don’t get any annoying error messages anymore, and it does display my NaNo widget properly. I’m still not madly in love with the layout but it’ll do for now.

The fun fact is that when you go for a run, make lasagna from scratch, and then put together an IKEA bed time flies like crazy. The bed took us four hours. Four hours! I had thought I was pessimistic when I planned for two. Ahem.

Then I had dinner, and a bit of a break.

Which means I’m sitting here, an hour before my bedtime and have yet to write the first word on the novel for today.

Stay tuned.