NaNoWriMo: Day 30: As a long weekend of NaNoWriMo draws to a close...

I spent from 9pm on Friday night until 8:45pm Sunday night, with eight hours off to sleep/eat in between to finish my NaNoWriMo novel for this year, and guess what...

I won!

NaNoWriMo: Day 23: Not As Good As I'd Hoped

I was going in for the kill yesterday. I started with nine thousand words, and the aim was to get to 30,000 by the end of last night. Simple. Reach fifteen thousand by lunch time, twenty thousand by tea, and then do the last five thousand before going to sleep.

I only managed six thousand.

How is very simple. Although I had my laptop with me for the whole day except for when I was blogging yesterday morning and eating, I made the decision that I could watch TV while working on my story. I mean, while I was in my room I was listening to the radio while still getting my thousand words per hour done, so what was the big deal? I was just going to watch Evita and then maybe some of the music channels.

But TV also means moving pictures that you have to focus on and that crush any pictures you have in your head. So although I spent about ten hours with my laptop in my lap (an old laptop that Dad's work was no longer needing while I wait it out to buy my new laptop), I managed only six thousand words.

To top it off, on the NaNoWriMo site, they were suggesting a challenge that everyone be up to 40,000 words by the time they went to sleep on Monday night. That was all well and good yesterday morning. I'm now up to about 16500 words, and there's no way I'm going to be able to write twenty-thousand words today and tomorrow. I have my step-cousin's 21st party tonight (odd to be on a Sunday, I know), and then work tomorrow, so I'll just have to not give up on myself and keep putting one word after another.

I'll write again once I've pushed over 40k!

NaNoWriMo: Day 22: And It Becomes Serious

It's the twenty-second day of NaNoWriMo.

I have written 10505 words.

There are eight days left of NaNoWriMo.

I have 39495 words left to write.

I'd better go and write them.

(I have $2.00 riding on this. Dad's bet me $2 that I won't have 50000 words by the end of next Sunday. In times of financial crisis, you need all the money you can get.)

So what am I doing here? I'm off to do NaNoWriMo!

NaNoWriMo: Day Two

Well, I managed to scrape together 1,712 words yesterday, which is at least on target according to NaNoWriMo guidelines!

Hope everyone else doing NaNoWriMo is having fun and enjoying writing!

NaNoWriMo: Day One: The Game Plan

I was half an hour away from being awake at the start of NaNoWriMo. Just thirty minutes more, and I could have turned on my laptop, opened a new document, and started typing the first few words of my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel.

But I was exhausted, so I went to bed.

Last year's NaNoWriMo I stressed myself out by procrastinating for the first two weeks, and then in the last two and a bit weeks writing at any time I wasn't at work or asleep, and was able to 'win' (a.k.a write fifty thousand words of a novel) two hours before the deadline of 11:59pm on the 30th November, 2007.

Not this year.

This year I have a game plan, and it starts today. My plan is:
On Saturdays and Sundays, write 4000 words per day.
On weekdays, write 2000 words per day.
The NaNoWriMo people say to keep up you should write 1,667 words a day.
Therefore, if I keep to my schedule, I win. Early.

Can I keep this motivation, when I can't even bring myself to sit down and concentrate on my Writing School assignments? I guess we'll see ...