Eight days into NaNo!

I don’t know why this post and the last one both start with the number eight, but I’ll go with it.

NaNoWriMo is fully underway and I am doing it! If you read my last post, you’d know that I wasn’t feeling super-confident about my ability to keep up with NaNo. 50k words in a month is a lot. 1,667 words per day also is a lot. And my first novel, while being nearly 90k words, took me thirteen months to get through, and I was usually only doing about 2,000 words at a time or less. But this time is different.

Maybe it’s because I’ve shut my inner-editor in a box and I’m just writing.

Maybe it’s because I’m writing in short spurts rather than trying to do an hour or two at a time.

Maybe it’s the self-competition.

Whatever it is, after eight days of NaNoWriMo, I am at 17,012 words (not including this blog post)! That’s an average of more than 2k words per day. Woot woot!

For anyone else out there who is working through NaNo or thinking about doing it in the future, there are a couple of things that are working for me:

1. Banish that inner-editor. I am part of the Metrowest Writer’s Group now for NaNo (they’re awesome) and to kick it off, they sent us all little boxes to “put your inner-editor into.” It’s just symbolic, of course, but I have just been writing and writing without going back and changing anything. That’s what January is for right?
2. Sprints have been amazing! I am easily distracted. It’s a constant problem for me. But, I have been able to write for 15, 20, 25 minutes and then get distracted. This may have to be my new way of writing in the future.
3. I write when my kids watch. We don’t let our kids watch that much during the day (much to their chagrin), so when they’re watching, I sit at the kitchen table and write. That, plus the 20-30 minutes in the morning before anyone wakes up has been golden.

I still might not be able to finish NaNoWriMo. You never know what comes up. But I am feeling better about being able to finish. And after it’s done, I might look back on this book and decide that it’s all trash. I don’t think so, but with the inner-editor locked away, there’s no way to know yet.

But regardless of the possible negatives. It has been a good experience and I am feeling good about my writing now. And that’s definitely what I needed in this dumpster fire of a year.

Thanks for reading!