Tag: downtime

  • The (Off) Day Off

    This DeathBar comes from the NaNo website and pulls its numbers directly from the ones I feed there. It keeps me honest with its DeathBar-iness.

    I’m a little over a week into NaNoWriMo. You can over there by the NaNo Death Bar that I’m doing pretty well. 17,294 words. As I write this I should be at 13,336 eight days in.

    I averaged 2882 words until yesterday, the day after the presidential election. I blame hangover from my political junkiness for not writing the full complement of 1667 words. I only got about 1,000 that day. Essentially a day off.

    Every writer needs a bit of down time. Stepping back a bit and taking to heart what’s already written is a good idea. The first two years I did NaNo I was petrified about being able to get back into the groove so I didn’t take a day off from writing in November. Consequently, the two books were awful. I mean terrible. (Well, not really but there were problems too numerous to fix at the time. Regardless. Moving on.)

    So last year and this year both, I’ve planned for a couple of days when work or life will likely get in the way and I won’t be able to write. Over the first weekend of NaNo I wrote 8,000 words. That’s not as much as some people (one buddy of mine wrote 11,000 in one day) but it’s pretty good for me. I can get that done a couple more times and I’ll make the 50,000 in 30 days in order to be a winner.

    The thing is, I’m writing on the same pace as I did last year and even with the day off this week I feel good. So far I’ve had one major surprise and I’ve written some pretty solid prose.I’m already a winner as far as this book goes.

    So looking at that 17,000 words in the DeathBar I can tell you I’m almost a third of the way to the NaNo goal, but only about 17% of the way to my goal for the novel.

    I’ll probably take another day off before too long. But now I’ve gotta get back to writing. See you next week.