Day 11 was almost the day that didn’t happen.
Okay, that’s a little bit dramatic. I actually would have finished the day with ~300 words if I had only done the one (small) writing stint.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, I’m getting tired. A large portion of the fatigue comes from trying to juggle too many balls (including NaNoWriMo). So, this weekend we have been planning a mini vacation. The emphasis should be on the word “mini”.
We are going North to do some more for my failing parent, but we decided that, since we can’t really do much until Monday/Tuesday, we would go North in stages. The first stage I talked about yesterday. We went as far as my Sister-in-Laws and had a nice dinner with her and my in-laws. Then my wife and I went to see Thor (lots of fun, by the way).
The following day (which is Day 11 of NaNo) we continued our journey.
My family has a cabin near one of the rare lakes in Alberta (funny, I always thought we had LOTS of lakes until someone from Minnesota followed by someone from Ontario showed me what LOTS actually means).
The cabin is typically a place for me to go when I need to mow lots of grass, paint deck and do maintenance. Last summer I was at the cabin for the better part of two weeks. All of it was dawn to dusk work and I went home more exhausted than I left.
This time was different (mostly). We did do a couple minor things (shovelled snow, put up a new set of blinds and replaced a toilet seat), but mostly we sat around and vegged out.
Let me make something very clear for those of you who have various ideas of what a cabin is. In our case, the “cabin” is a 1940’s vintage bungalow that was moved onto a full daylight basement. The main floor is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 800 square feet. It is heated, has running water and a full bathroom, electricity.
It is less a cabin and more a house with a nice view (we’re about one kilometre off the lake on a hill looking down). It’s not exactly roughing it.
So, we were watching television, eating junk food and basically chilling out.
That’s pretty hard to stop and getting the motivation to put words down was pretty difficult.
Challenges for the Day
The biggest? Too comfortable and actually relaxing for the first time in days (weeks?).
Number of Words for the Day: 2061 words
In a couple previous years I set daily personal goals of 2,500 words per day. That had me finishing on day 20/21 depending on my level of success. This year I set a much more modest goal of 2,000 words per day and I’m averaging about 2,200. I’m certainly not going to be unhappy with that.
How I Hit my Word Total for the Day
I wrote about 300 words of my total while we were driving (once again). Then I took a very long break. It was until 8:00 PM that I started working on my word count again. I finished up by about 9:45 PM. The words weren’t coming quite as quickly this time, largely because I started within sight and earshot of the television. When I realized just how slowly I was going, I retired to a quiet place and knocked the words off.
Today’s Goal: 4,000 words
I’m going to challenge myself today. I don’t have anything of note to accomplish so, even if I just do a few sprints throughout the day, I should do better than previous days. My small goal is to push past the 25,000 word mark.
Tactics to Keep the Words Flowing
NaNoWriMo purists say that you should start a brand new work for NaNo and only work on that project over the course of the month. I say, if that works for you then that’s great. I suspect those people often write a fair amount of overly editable material because there are times when they aren’t sure what to write down.
I did it a little bit differently
As you may or may not know, I have a Wattpad novel I have been working on since earlier this year. It is titled GalaxyBillies 2 and I’m now about 74% complete. I didn’t want to just leave my readers in the lurch so I’ve been working on that novel as well as my NaNo project.
I have also been writing pretty regularly on Scouts of the Apocalypse: Zombie Masters. In fact, I’m now about one-third complete the novel (yes, I started word one on November 1st).
The advantage for me doing more than one project at a time is, when I start to struggle for the next sentence/paragraph/scene I can move over to the other work until the new ideas work their way through my brain.
It has worked pretty well so far.
Number of Words to Date: 24282 words
You did more than 1,667! Nice work man. I started a new novel for NaNoWriMo but quickly realized I just need to spend my time editing the novel I just finished so I can get it to beta readers. Keep up the good work Plested!