Ups and Downs

The good news about NaNoWriMo: Every time I’ve sat down to write, I’ve banged out more than 4,000 words each time, with a personal best of cranking out around 6,000 words in a 3 1/2 hour session. That’s moving for me.

The bad news about NaNoWriMo: I’ve only truly sat down to write about three times in 15 days. That’s not good. I’m behind, I know it. Sure, huge production when I’m sitting down and getting the words on my PC, good for me, but I’m just not sitting down enough.

Part of it has to do with the fact that sometimes, no matter how you try to not think about it, or if you try defend yourself against it, sometimes you think that what you are writing is total and complete shit. It’s hard to fight against. Not only that, it’s discouraging. Now for the most part, my internal editor has taken a month off. That means that when I do sit down to write, that part of me is mostly gone so I don’t worry about plot holes or bad characterization, or my worst writing flaw of mine, using so many points of view that the reader can’t tell whose head they’re currently in. The bad part is that the close friend of the internal editor is that voice in your head that tells you that what you are doing is pointless when you are away from your writing. That, for me, is t-o-u-g-h, tough.

And there are other things at work against me. I don’t particularily like writing at home. It’s too distracting. If I lived a simple life where I didn’t have high speed internet, a collection of books and movies, Netflix and the ever-present TV, I think I would get more done. I also think it would be pretty boring because I don’t see myself writing all the time in my spare time. Maybe someday I can break from the material world and do something worth that time. I’ll admit I’m weak now, but maybe someday. Anyway, if I want to write, I have to be somewhere else. As much as I like local coffee shops and hope they are successful, there are a lot of people that go there and that can be distracting as well. In fact, I wanted to go to Blue Moon Cafe the other night and found out that it was packed. It usually is, but it was discouraging for me to even go there. I drove down to Dunn Brothers and found a similar fate. Personally, writing in seclusion works pretty well for me, but I just don’t get that chance. I drove all the way to Nina’s where I settled down for a nice burst of words.

Regardless, I have a deadline to meet and I have too many commitments to others not to finish this year. Not only do I want to finish with over 50,000 words, but I want to finish the story as well. I want to have a completed story this year. The way the story is turning out, I’m not sure I can do it under 70,000. In the last couple of weeks of November, that is a lot of words to crank out. But I think I can do it. I have to. I have a deadline.