This is a phrase that fills me with dread at the moment. Dread and shame. I have been struggling away, adding shamefully few words every day to arrive at my current word count (7578 at the time of writing but see the widget on the right for an updated figure). I have been writing mostly on the bus and train on my daily commute (on my BlackBerry), with a few additional sessions at home at my desk. It has been going well while I'm writing: I'm happy with my idea and feel like it's going somewhere. The problem is, I am failing to give it enough time. There are excuses I could make, some of them are even legitimate, but I'm finding it way too difficult to put in the necessary time to get up to the word count. It probably didn't help that the first two days of November were both extended work days.
That said, the bottom line is clearly positive: I've written words that I wouldn't have done and I've established a new routine of writing on my commute. That will, of course, reduce my reading time but you can't do everything, can you? And there's still time. I will keep going and see how far I get, but the 50k is not looking very likely at this point (although today I did add more new words than the daily target to get me there on time, but I don't think that's repeatable on a daily basis). I do feel, though, that NaNo may have achieved for me what I needed it too.
I'm still going to grit my teeth when people ask me how it's going, though...
You need to do a word sprint with me and Neeky. We have been doing two to three 20 minutes races and have thrashed our word count and still have a good story.
ReplyDeleteI've done some word sprints too - they do help. Though saying that, I have still woken up distinctly stuck this morning...
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Beth, that what we get out of Nano may be a lot more than 50,000 words. It has improved my writing routines and I can knock out more words in a session now. Hmmm, not sure if they are good words but I will not consider that too deeply until November is over!
Than be happy with that Beth. Last year I did NaNo to get back into the writing routine and I now have a revised 2nd draft of that novel. That would never have happened if I hadn't done NaNo in the first place. I didn't sign up this year as I'm revising last years, I have reports to write and stuff going on, but I did start a new WIP in the spirit of NaNo and plan to have it finished by the end of January, maybe that deadline is better for you and we can keep each other going.
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