First Week of NaNoWriMo

Update 22 1-7 Nov 2021

Daylight savings ended, good. I hear that a number of reps and senators are looking to get rid of Daylight Savings entirely, but with this congress I expect nothing to work.

And that is the most politics I wish to have on this site. If you follow my twitter or know me then you already know my thoughts and feelings. This place is all about the writing.

And it is November, and Nov. is all about the holiday ramp up and writing novels.

Words

This was a pretty good week for writing. My laptop finally stopped fixing the H key (for the last few weeks each day would be a 50-50 chance that the H key worked on my keyboard) and it is permanently dead. With my desktop also dead, I took my keyboard from there and combined it with my laptop. It kind of sucks, but it works.

On the flip side I also got a 10-keyless mechanical board that will fit in my laptop bag, and now I’ve been very mobile with my writing again. I managed five days of writing this week, instead of my normal 3, and that was with still having a recording session for the podcast and having to work on Sunday, my normal main day to write and usually a day off for me.

With all of the obstacles, I still got up a decent word count (a little low for me…) but a respectable 13,135 for the week. A little anemic for nanowrimo but decent for my normal 6000+ goal per week.

Struggling Thru

I am having second thoughts again already. Wondering if the section I’m working on now is too slow. Wondering if I spend too much time with characters arguing. Am I repeating too many of the same points? Is the pace too slow? Am I rushing along the things I should slow down for, but slowing down for things that aren’t important?

Basically, I’m having a lot of bad thoughts while I write, and I remember back when I was younger and just starting, I never cared. I would just write the story and enjoy the process, and now I’m second guessing everything. Which has led me to delete whole pages while trying to get my words out. I used to say, write the whole rough draft in a rush and worry about it in second. But now I’m worrying the entire time I’m writing.

Rejections

So, this week started out good and I managed a fair number of words and then I ended the week with a rejection from one of my queried agents. Made me very sad as they represent my favorite agency, but I still have a few irons in the fire and I have a dozen more agents on my list to query. I’ll keep trying.

That said, I’m writing this blog on Sunday morning and afterwards I’m supposed to start my writing session for the day. Finishing the chapter that’s been dragging… and hopefully moving on to newer material.  But my head (and heart) are not wholly into it.

That’s part of the writing life, near as I can tell from my conversations. Many of us fight imposter syndrome, many of us struggle with words. Some of us get disgusted and have to fight just to put their fingers on a keyboard. I used to be like that. I would avoid sitting at the keys for months, and then once I started typing I would love the sound of my keyboards and the feel of the keys beneath my fingers.

My Goals are Not YOUR Goals

I also want to take a moment and acknowledge that the numbers I put up for words are really good to some people and really low to others. I get mad at myself if I can’t do 2000 words in a single session, but I know I have friends who are happy if they can get 300 words in an entire day. I am not saying there is a correct number of words a person should reach. We all work in different ways/styles/etc. We should all have our OWN goals, and we should NEVER compare our goals to our peers. Nor should we compare ourselves to OUR PASTS.

I used to have 10,000-word days. A normal writing session used to be 5000+ words. Now I’m trying to keep myself happy with 2000. I have already talked in many of my past posts about how I used to be very unhealthy in my writing (sitting for hours, skipping eating, exercise, or family/friends). I had to change things up to try and balance out my life more.

Remember that outlining, sketching scenes, creating characters, world-building, and everything else you do between sessions at the keys… that is ALSO WRITING. Seriously. For the longest time I denied all of that work, but it took several of my professors to get it in my head that this was still writing. That research and that outlining, those thoughts and dialogs, they all contribute to making the book and they all work your creative muscles.

Enough

Ok.

I’ve tried to be uplifting enough. This week is going to see a change up in schedule, I had to change my days off this week. I have a wedding to attend later in the week, and I think we might be skipping recording the podcast. I have three main days I can get writing done, and I’m going to try to get in extra short sessions as well. I’m hoping to be hit 25k by the next blog, we’ll see how that works out.

The holidays are coming up faster and faster, so I’m sure that will cause issues as well. We’ll see what happens. I really thought I’d have a finished novel by now, and that I’d be working on the outline for the next books right now. But I see now that I have issues with my process. Too many worries and maybe not a lot pre-planning on my part. Well, not ENOUGH pre-planning, I do spend a lot of time on the outlining and pre-work. I used to spend too much time on world-building, and used it as a way to avoid writing. I just need to get back to tweaking the balance between the two.

OUTRO

Anyway, I feel like this was more rambling and less informative. But it is what it is.

Hopefully my words help or touch some of you, and if not, thank you for reading this far anyway. I will eventually get back in here with more gaming, comics, movies, TV, etc talk as well as the novel progress.