On This Thing Called Writing (#4)

Two days remain of my NaNoWriMo challenge. This morning, after sleeping in until 7 am, I sat down and wrote just over 4,000 words. A new daily record! That also means I only need about 6,000 more words. There is no reason why I can't reach 50,000 by Tuesday. Unless I decide to give up (or something catastrophic gets in the way).   

I'm excited to see how it ends.

(This image is a metaphor for where I am at with my writing goal.)

I am not going to have a completed novel by November 30th. With my current story, fifty-thousand words is not enough to tie it all up. However, that was never my intention. My goal this time around (I have tried the NaNoWriMo challenge twice before) was to write daily, preferably in the morning, for at least an hour. Well, I have only skipped six days so far, and I doubt I will miss any more (only two remain).

In addition, with the exception of three days, I exceeded my daily goal of seventeen hundred words. Only one of those three days was under a thousand, and that was on Thanksgiving, when, despite being exhausted, I decided I needed to do something. Anything. It was only seven hundred words, but it counted.

Finally, I have had three days with over three thousand words. And a fourth day just over four thousand. This very morning.

Today's achievement stands out as the most important. After writing three thousand words on Tuesday, I skipped Wednesday: the whole day was spent cleaning and prepping for that night and the next day. Then, on Thursday, I put off writing, until just before, because I decided I needed to get something done. It was a week showing, not even half of my daily goal, but I did it. Well, I slept in on Friday, and we had to get a tree first thing in the morning. Skipped the day. When Saturday rolled around, I slept in again, and realized I needed to get my car inspected. That took priority, taking up my morning energy. And after eating all day, and decorating the the house, I was too weary that night to do anything.  However, before going to bed, I ran the numbers, and figured I would have to come up with just north of three thousand words across three days. Laying my head upon my pillow, the task sounded daunting.

Well, I did sleep in again, getting out of bed around 7 am. Then I got distracted by social media, followed by some articles on the internet. My morning chores reared their ugly heads, so I tackled them next. The day was slipping away, but not those numbers. The remaining daily count kept rising, as I began to resign myself to another day without writing.  

Yet, around ten in the morning, I found myself sitting on the couch, in the presence of my wife and daughter, typing away. Despite a few interruptions, and a bit of a mental block after only one page, I continued along with my story. At some point, I stopped, and did a word count: 4058 words. The scene was complete, and other chores were calling out to me (not to mention the leftover pumpkin pie); therefore, I stopped writing.

In the end, I did not let the failures of the past four days stop me from working on a very important goal. Instead, I sat down and focused. While it was not first thing in the morning, it was close enough. And, despite spending the entire month wrestling with the notion that the story I have written out is not what I have playing out in my head, I somehow managed to type away for an entire hour-and-a-half without a struggling to find words.  

I persevered. And for me, that means a lot.