Is this a winner badge?
More after I get some sleep. Headed to Iowa City this weekend, so I might not get the opportunity to post again until Monday. That is, unless I die while driving through the ice and snow this weekend. So, if I don’t post again by, let’s say, next Tuesday, assume I’m dead and think nice things about me. Thanks.
Only today and tomorrow left in NaNoWriMo, and I’m sitting at around 47,000 words. Almost there! We’re traveling Friday night to visit family in Iowa City, so that basically means that I need to get about 3,000 words written TODAY! AAAAAUGH!!!
I can probably do it. Yeah, that’s right. I think I might just be able to WIN this thing!
The Central Iowa NaNo-ers were on the Channel 13 news last night. I was sad that I couldn’t be there with them. I haven’t been able to make any of the write-ins this month, which means I haven’t enjoyed the community aspect of NaNo pretty much at all. I mean to fix that next year. But I’m proud to be a part of this community and the group of people involved in the Des Moines area are a top-notch crowd. I hope most of them return next year so I can enjoy their camaraderie even more.
I hit 38,112 words last night. I was doing pretty well with the new 2,350 daily word limit over my Thanksgiving vacation, but hit several days of road blocks, starting with Thanksgiving, and going on through the weekend. Last night, though, I was able to overcome my NEW new limit of 2,450 words by a fairly slim margin. The rest of this week I have to keep caught up if I hope to hit 50,000 by Friday.
Only five days left to go! I can do this! Hopefully! Maybe! I’m not really sure! AAAAAUGH!
I did some figuring last night using my handy progress sheet. I’m several thousand words behind at this point, and I’ve been failing at even keeping up with the 1,667 limit. What this means is that essentially, I am desperately overdue for a more realistic daily goal. If I force myself to write 1,667 words every day at this point, then I’ll still be horrendously short of my 50,000 word goal by the 30th.
So, as you can probably tell by this chart below, I’ve upped my daily goal to 2,250 words. If I can write a minimum of 2,250 words from today until the 30th, I can make 50,000 words.
God have mercy on us all.
I’ve got the entire week off next week. On Monday, I get to stay home with Alex while the wife goes off and does…something…wifey. On Tuesday, I’m traipsing into Des Moines to spend the day in a coffee shop somewhere and write. All day long. Or at least most of the day. Wednesday, I get to attend my son’s Pre-K Thanksgiving breakfast celebration in the morning, and then back to DM for some more writing. Thursday is turkey and pumpkin pie at the mother-in-law’s house (if the weather is good), or my parents’ house (if the weather is nasty, as it sounds like it might be). Hopefully, more writing will be done on these days. I’m hoping to get out of this major deficit I’ve found myself in before the end of the week.
Maybe I’ll find the time to finally finish Metroid Prime 3! I’m hoping to reward myself for reaching 50,000 with Super Mario Galaxy, so I need to get MP3 out of the way to clean the plate before that. Of course, if I don’t hit 50,000, I guess I won’t need to worry about it, will I?
Well, that’s not a very optimistic way of looking at things.
Zero. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zip. The Anti-Number. That’s how many words I wrote on my novel yesterday. Prior to that, my lowest daily count was 222. Now, it’s zero.
At the NaNoWriMo kick-off meeting, some people mentioned how the middle of the month is the most difficult. You lose a lot of steam around the 15th, is what they said. It’s definitely true. I’ve lost all will to perform ANY writing at all. I don’t even want to do email. This blog post is giving me a nose bleed. All I want to do at this point is curl up on the couch with a copy of Super Mario Galaxy and forget the world exists for a couple days.
But I have a novel to write.
And I’m now roughly 9,000 words behind.
Why. Am. I. Doing. This.
P.S. This blog post contains 145 words.
I’m hovering somewhere around 13,700 words as of today. Mathematically, every six days this month, we NaNo’ers should have completed another 10,000 words. So, by the end of the day today (the twelfth of November), I should be at 20,000 words.
Ha.
My goal is to get to 15,000 before going to bed tonight. My reward will be ice cream. Even if it’s at midnight.
I should really be writing, I suppose. I wrote a measly 400 words Monday, and by Tuesday I was well over 3,000 words behind where I should have been. So in a flurry of writing, I got through another 1,200 words yesterday, so that I was within arm’s reach of the day six goal of 10,000 words. But not nearly close enough.
So, today, what do I do when I should be writing more of the novel? I draw. Lately I’ve been fascinated with the cutesy cartoon characterizations that Katie Cook draws. You can see more of her work on her frequently updated Livejournal. She does awesome drawings of Star Wars, Harry Potter, superheroes, and other geek media stuff. I love the style, and I’ve been meaning to try my hand at it to see what I could come up with.
I thought, if she’s doing geek movies and television, why don’t I attempt video games? And after reading Penny Arcade’s Monday comic, I thought that Assassin’s Creed would be a perfect place to start. So below is something that I whipped together over my lunch break today.
Yeah, I should stick to writing.
I was able to bust through into Chapter 3 on Sunday, ripping through 1,800+ words in a single day. This was despite the fact that I had to take a lengthy break in the middle of the day to get all of our leaves cleaned up. My father helped me out, so a shout out of thanks go to him, of course. I’ll be repaying the favor by helping him setup his digital camera so he can download the roughly 3,000 photos he’s taken since they got the darned thing, and never bothered to figure out how to get them off.
I think I ended up picking up more leaves than I wrote words, but I’m okay with that. According to my progress sheet, I met 111% of my daily total (which is 1,667 words per day), and 97% of my cumulative daily total (which yesterday was 6,668 total words). I’m making pretty good progress, and the novel is coming together in ways I had never intended, which is awesome. I’m now 13% of the way towards 50,000 words. Now I just have to hope that my momentum continues past the fourth day.
How is everyone else making out?
She’s keeping me on task, that’s for sure. I was going to deal with only having about 700 words written for the day. And she talked me into continuing on, trudging mercilessly through another 600 words for a total today of 1,365.
Man, this is tough going. And it’s only day two! I can’t imagine how this is going to feel by day fifteen.
The worst part about this is that I can really only get any writing done late at night, when my brain has turned to mush. So I have very little motivation to get any writing done when I’m tired and not thinking clearly.
I guess that’s why the wife is keeping me focused! She knows I want to do this, and she’s going to keep me going through the whole thing.
There will be time to rest (and edit!) in December. For now … WE WRITE!
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I live in the sheltered land of the midwest, born and raised in a small farming town in the center of Iowa. I am passionate about my family, writing science fiction, playing video games, and perusing the internet.
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