NaNo Becomes Challenging
In this post I engage in a lot of complaining and whining. It’s probably not that interesting, but I feel a pathetic need to justify my failure to achieve my daily word count goals for NaNoWriMo. Read at your own risk.
So I cruised through my first few days of NaNo without too much trouble other than staying up late to get my words in. . . then the weekend hit, and I had to work some overtime. On Sunday I had a major crash from sleep deprivation and ended up with a killer headache that kept me away from the computer screen all day. The same work project that kept me working overtime on Saturday bled into Monday and Tuesday night, and I didn’t meet my word count goals either night. So as of yesterday I was a total of about four days behind, which meant that my daily word count needed to be bumped up from 1,667 to 1,883 per day if I was to finish on time.
Then today happened. It was a crazy work day, trying to put the final touches on this big project I’m trying to get done before headed out of town while dealing with a leaky furnace (yeah, furnace—apparently ours has a condensation pump that failed). We had a repair company come give an estimate on the damage, and unfortunately there’s mold. So we have a big nasty repair bill headed our way unless we can get the furnace company to pay up. Their furnace repair guys showed up at 9pm and didn’t leave until 10:30pm. In between all this we tried to have a birthday party for my little girl Jane. It was a pretty simply affair this time, with Missy being sick and all the crazy work and house stuff going on.
So here it is midnight, and I’m blogging about how hard it is to get lots of words written with so much crap going on, when I should be writing. This post is about 350 words, so I could have increased my NaNo word count by that much. So before I look like too much of a hypocrite, I’d better sign off and get to bed. I have a five hour drive ahead of me tomorrow and a wedding to attend the next day.
I don’t see you as a hypocrite at all. I’m a bit behind too. That first weekend when I utterly failed to reach my word counts, I felt horrible. Part of me didn’t want to keep going and wanted me to give up and say it was okay. But another part of me was so ecstatic that I had even gotten this far. It was more than I had ever written. Ever. lol. So even if you are way behind and life is making it impossible to write, don’t be so harsh on yourself. Be proud of yourself for getting as far as you did and as far as you will by the end of November. Maybe your word count won’t be that much bigger than it is now. Maybe it will. Either way, reward yourself for writing. Doesn’t matter how much of it you were able to do.
Yesenia, thanks for the encouragement! That’s pretty much exactly how I’m looking at things now. Everything I write this month is something I would not have written otherwise. And I need that.
I just got home from the same five hour drive that took me away on Thursday. It’s supposed to be a four hour drive, but I was counting an extra hour for various stops to deal with the kids and baby. The drive home took us six hours. Ugh. But I’m home, and I’ll try to get some words in later tonight after we’ve got everything unpacked and settled back in a bit more.
It’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll fall behind at some point during the month. Even if you are too far behind to catch up, you can at least come close. And if you just write as much as you can toward whatever your new daily catch-up goal is, you might be surprised by how many words end up coming out.
And besides, even if all you end up with is a strong start on a manuscript, you’ve still got something you wouldn’t have had otherwise, and you can keep working on it after November at your own pace.
Finishing with a 50k word count in November isn’t the real point; drafting a novel is.
As Cornelius says in Meet the Robinsons, keep moving forward!
So there’s your pep talk from Ing. I don’t deliver too many of those, so treasure it well. Heh.