I wanted to touch upon my personal NaNoWriMo experience thus far, because I have come quite the distance, or so I think, at 19,000 words, with only half a month remaining. True to my nonconformity nature, I decided to block out a thirty day period outside of the month of November, given that for some reason that month passed me by, yet I still wanted to engage in the challenge of attempting fifty thousand words in such a short time frame. While I set out to write 1667 words per day to get there, slowly but steadily, life got in the way. Rather, work got in the way. By work, I mean the opposite of my life's calling. In other words, my day job maxed me out throughout the week and drained me of sufficient energy to press on with my initial plan of action, to conquer the 1667 word count on a daily basis.
About two and half days went by in the first week of not putting pen to paper, because I was too tired, and then I spent last Saturday playing catch up. I ended up shortening my catch up time from 2.5 days to 1.5 days. This past week came and went and the same struggles surfaced. All did not end well, with another day or two coming and going in which I could not muster the willpower to enter my writer's den and continue on, because I was so stressed out with all of the external noise and felt it impossible to get back into the groove. I feared disappointing my characters, disappointing myself, given my lack of fervor. This fear prevented me from persevering.
With much reluctance, I did some calculations last night and determined I was quite a few more laps behind. Rather than give up, I re entered the plot and although the overall flow was a bit disjointed and I obsessed a bit too much on the word count than what my characters were trying to tell me and where they were going, I at least made up for some of the lost time and am now a mere 6,000 words off the mark, which is only a day further behind than I was last week, which isn't too shabby, considering had I not forced myself to commit to making an effort last night, I would have been berating myself even more forcefully, making it all the more difficult to begin again.
