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NaNoReWriMo: Eliminating Creative Distractions

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As predicted I wrote no words on Day 9.

That was fine – I anticipated it. I had a colleague’s leaving party directly after work and spent lunchtime sorting out her card. And I had Day 10 off work, but I only wrote 823 words.

I now need to write over 2000 words a day to finish on time.

Today I spent most of the day editing videos for my upcoming Udemy courses. It has been really bothering me that I hadn’t finished them yet, so I resolved to get them all done and submit the two courses for approval by the end of this weekend.

I’ve felt torn between the two projects every day so far this month – part of me wanting to focus on NaNoReWriMo, the other part just wanting to get these courses sorted. When I write, I need to keep reading to top up my well of words, and so ideally I’d spend my spare time, when not writing, on reading, but I haven’t been able to read very much this month.

So I’m going to try to get these other projects out of the way to enable me to focus wholly on my NaNoReWriMo project. Let me know in the comments if you think this is a good idea or not! Another part of me thinks I should be able to temporarily shelve the other projects, but they’re niggling at me.

NaNoReWriMo: Keeping It All in My Head

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Today I only added 54 words.

My lunch break was frequently interrupted so I mostly spent it reading over what I’d already written and correcting a paragraph that I’d written in the wrong tense. I have a tendency to slip from past to present and vice versa.

I did predict this in yesterday’s post, so I wasn’t surprised. Tomorrow will probably be similar. However, I think it’s good to take a mini-break to read it over because something I really struggled with when writing the previous version was keeping everything in my head. By ‘everything’, what I really mean is the essence of the novel, the way it should feel – ultimately, the style, as well as the plot and character details. I felt it was too hard to keep all those balls in my mental air.

This is my main reason for doing the rewrite all in one month – the intensity should fix ‘everything’ in my mind while I’m working on it. But still, it’s a lot of words to remember, so reading it over helps.