OK, so another day of not so good word counts.I’ve got no real excuse tonight, other than just got distracted. But then, it’s a Friday night. Who could be blamed for wanting to relax and let their brain go into neutral on a Friday night?!

So I’ve got the weekend ahead of me, though a weekend away, so I’m a little bit worried about just how much I’ll get done. I’ll have my laptop with me, so hopefully I can crank out a few thousand words, but I’ve still got the rest of the month.

To be on track, I need to be at 25,000 by tomorrow … not sure I’ll get there, but you never know. The further behind I get, the harder it will be to catch up, but there’s still 2 weekends to go in November. If all else fails, the final weekend of the 29th and 30th might be very busy.

So yesterday was my first truly pitiful for adding to the word count. And strangely, I’m ok with that.

I got a call from my cousin who comes to Melbourne maybe once every six months, and she wanted to catch up for dinner. So I made the decision to go out, thinking I could write when I got home. We ended up at The Quarter on Degraves St, nice little place for pizza and coffee, though some air con would have been appreciated.

So was home by 8:45pm, thinking I still had plenty of time to write. But when I lay down on the lounge for 5 minutes, I realized I was in no state to concentrate on anything. So I went straight to bed, and was asleep by 9pm. And woke up this morning feeling a whole lot better for it!!

So the weekend is almost here. Again a busy one, going up to shepparton to see my sister compete in a half ironman, but am hoping that despite that, I can catch up a little on my writing.

Internet flash games are evil!!!11

Somehow tonight, I managed to lose about 3 or 4 hours of good writing time to a few dumb, but incredibly addictive flash games. 10:30pm came around, and I hadn’t written a word yet today. It was one of those moments of personal disappointment in myself that I could have so little self-discipline. But then, everyone needs a bit of a break now and then, don’t they?!

But anyway, fueled by self-disgust, tiredness, and a bit of Dido music, I embarked on an incredibly futile dash to 20,000 words. With so little time remaining in the evening, I certainly put that internal censor to bed early, and somehow, managed to get through 1,600 words in an hour and a half. That feels like a personal record. May not be the greatest moments in literary history that were written tonight, but it was something.

I’m excited that by tomorrow, I’ll have hit 20,000 words! Yes, I know, it still means another 30,000 to go, but I’m going to revel in the small victories as much as I can.

So I managed to put another 2,000 words onto the count today, which I’m happy about.

I’m finding another interesting thing as I’m going through this process. Recently, I guess since the weekend, when I had little time, but rushed out the little bits that I could, I’m starting to question whether what I’m writing is actually quality. Normally I’d be worried that I’m writing something that I’m not 100% happy with, but here’s the strangest thing: it’s actually very, very liberating.

It makes a strange kind of sense. Once I realise that what I’m writing isn’t perfect – that I’m going to have to come back and re-draft and fix up things once the story is finished – it’s like suddenly I’m giving myself permission to continue not being perfect …… (hmm, interesting insight … I know I’m far from perfect, yet I need to give myself permission to be that way … talk about setting yourself up for failure … anyhoo) …… where was I. Oh yeah, so now that I know that the first draft is not going to be a masterpiece in its present form, I can just let myself write these long meandering scenes that seem to have little point and inane dialog.

And that’s really the point isn’t it? Hemingway famously once said “The first draft of anything is shit” … and that’s really the heart of NaNoWriMo. If your first draft is going to be shit, then make it spectacularly shit. Because if you don’t get that first draft out, it’s not going to get any better by sitting in your head for the next ten years.

Close to 2,000 words completed tonight is a fair effort. I’ve been finding the writing pretty slow going of late – I’m still letting my inner censor critique everything as I’m writing, and I can definitely see it slowing me down. So I made a special effort tonight to not be as critical of myself and what I was writing as I normally would be, and I found that the first 1,000 or so words of it flowed out quite quickly … maybe in about an hour of writing rather than the 2 it’s been taking recently for that much.

So i discovered a few things today that might help with my faster, more flowing writing in the future… the first – and this is something that I’ve heard over and over, as has any writer – is to write what you know. So I was writing a bar scene tonight, mostly dialogue, a bit of description, but when you are familiar with a scene or setting that you are writing about, it becomes soooo much easier to write about it fast.

The other thing technique – which I’m hoping in the near future will help boost my word count significantly – is pointless anecdotes. I wrote one of those tonight that went on for a bit over 500 words. I have the feeling I’ll come back in editing at a later stage and delete it, but for now, in the goal of spewing as much on the page in a month as possible, this may be a crutch I fall back on regularly

So I’ve lost now most of the head start on the word count that I developed in the first few days of NaNoWriMo, but as of this moment, I’m still not behind. At 1667 words a day, 15,000 is exactly where I need to be today to be on track.

But knowing that I wouldn’t get much of a chance to write this weekend was precisely the reason for the early sprints that I did. I didn’t get anything done until late in the afternoon and evening today. We’d been out all day catching up with friends in Sydney, and it wasn’t until we got to the airport to wait for our flight back home that I got a chance to pull out the computer and start pounding away at my story.

So I feel like the story is a bit sluggish at the moment. After a solid start in chapters 1 and 2, I kind of feel like chapters 3 and 4 are a little weak. I’m still struggling to work out the guts of the book – if I was to break it into the traditional 3 acts like a play, I think that I’m almost done with Act 1, I have some rough ideas for Act 3 (including the ending), but still have NFI how I’m going to bridge the distance in Act 2. I’ll be setting up a few things in the next few days that hopefully will give me something interesting to write about in Act 2 – there’ll be a high profile murder, an unexpected love interest for my main character – I should be able to find something to work with in there somewhere…

Worst word count increase so far, but with everything else I’ve been doing today, it’s a surprise that I got anything done at all.

Today saw me up early in the morning to catch a flight to Sydney. We were heading up there to surprise a friend who was having 30th birthday drinks but who didn’t think we were coming. We got to Sydney, checked into our hotel, went out an hour later to catch up with another friend, then back to the hotel to get ready to to out to the party.

The day didn’t offer much opportunity to write, so considering that, I was actually very happy with a word count of 800. It was just a few hundred words here and there – sitting at the airport waiting for the plane to board, and while waiting at the hotel before going out – but I think the lesson to learn from this is that I can still be relatively productive if I use the time I have available to me wisely.

My word count was not quite what I would have liked for today, but hell it’s a Friday night. Even though I had a few beers at the end of the day at work, I didn’t go out to the pub like I usually do with the boys. Instead I went home to write and hang out with my partner, Maria.

I had the time during the evening to get a lot done, but I find it distracting to my writing to do it when someone elsenis around. Most of the writing I’ve done in the past has been done in isolation, not when I’m helping my girlfriend print out photos.

But I also know that I’ve given myself a bit of breathing space too … If I only do 1000 words each early over the weekend – at 15,000 words by the end of Sunday, I’m still on track.

Oh, and 13,000 words means I’m just over a quarter of the way there!!

I managed to add 2,000 more words to the word count today, not too bad for a work day. And I finished before midnight! Always a bonus!

I found my writing flowing a lot better today – I had every intention of getting in 500 words at lunchtime, but I got talking to one of the guys I work with for 20 minutes or so, and by the time I grabbed myself a coffee and a seat, I only had about 15 minutes left before I had to be back at work. Still, in a matter of 10 minutes, I managed to punch out the first 300 words of today’s count. There’s something liberating about having such a short space of time to write in. It forces you not to agonise over every word. It’s the same principle that the whole NaNoWriMo event is based…

That said, I find that when I have a block of a few hours of time in the evening to write, I do agonise over certain words and phrases for a lot longer than I should. And I get fixated on a particular detail that I feel I have to research before I can write another word. Tonight, it was rhinoceros leather. I know, random detail, not important…

I’m almost at that point though where I’ve done my dash of preconceived ideas for the novel. I’m hoping that soon the characters will take over and start telling me where the story’s going…

Woot! A fifth of the way there.

And somehow, I managed to fit in 1,600 words in one of busier days I’ve had in a while. Admittedly, those words were completed sometime around 12:15am, which – with work the next day later today – is not ideal, not something I want to be doing everyday.

I managed to give myself a kickstart on it by waking up at 6:30am, and going 300 words before I got up to go to work. Then at lunchtime, I was up and down Swanston St visiting homeloan people at the bank, and picking up keys for the library that we use for our writing group – that was also tonight, from 6-8pm. And somehow in there, I managed to fit in a quick beer for a mate who was leaving for PNG for a few weeks.

So I got home about 8:45pm, had a bit of dinner, but it was probably about 9:30pm before I got into the serious writing. I wish I could race through a 1000 words in 20 minutes like some people can, but even though NaNoWriMo advocates quantity over quality, quality is still something that I find hard to leave at the door. I’ll save that for the final weekend if I’ve gotta pump out 20,000 words in 2 days…

… praying fiercely that won’t happen though!

Ok, so I didn’t make it to the 10,000 words that I was hoping to get to by today. And it’s back to work tomorrow, and trying to fit in 1,667 words around all the other things that I need to get done. But I’ve made a good start at least. I’m a good day ahead of where I need to be with the word count by today, so there’s still a little breathing room.

So I didn’t get a lot done today. I guess my biggest excuse reason was that I was in a bad mood for most of the day. I’ve never been able to use bad moods to fuel my writing – that’s a skill I’d like to have, take all that raw emotion and turn it into beautiful fiction – usually because when I’m in a bad mood, there’s a very specific reason for it, and my mind is too fixated on that to be able to think about story and characters, etc.

But sometimes you’ve just gotta take the time and do what’s necessary to sort these things out. In an attempt to get it off my mind, I vented onto virtual paper for twenty minutes … a thousand words that I wish I could add to my NaNoWriMo count. Oh well…

But once it was sorted and my mind free again, I got down to a bit of writing, did about 800 words without too much trouble while fitting in a few other things as well. Kind of good … I’m already at a point in the story where I’m not exactly sure where it’s going. Feeling like I’m treading water while waiting to get to the next good part. At least over the next few days, I’ll have a bit of downtime – tram trips, that sort of thing – to do a bit of planning for where it is going.

Nothing much special happened today apart from a lot of writing. I kept to my 500 words at time limit and it worked pretty well. It feels like a manageable amount in a single sitting, and about how often I need another cup of tea or coffee.

Another solid day of writing is behind now, so I’m just kicking back having dinner at my girlfriend’s place. She didn’t see a lot of me during NaNoWriMo last year. So while it’s still early days and I’m ahead of the word count game, I’m spending what time I can relaxing and not bearing myself up for being slack!

I’m finding that thinking about writing 2500 words in a day seems like a daunting task. I managed to do it today, but it felt like it took all day. I would have sat down at about 9am this morning to start, but it was broken up with frequent breaks to get another cup of coffee, or to chuck on the tv for half an hour or so.

But later in the afternoon, I decided that I would do it in smaller chunks. I picked 500 words… It seemed like a manageable amount. And I found that worked really well for me. I’d write 500 words, take a break then get back to it again. This would take me about 30 – 60 min, depending on what I was writing at the time.

And as I get into the main flow of NaNoWriMo, doing 1667 words can be broken into 3 sessions a day. That might be 500 words in the morning before work, another 500 at lunch, then finish it off in the evening. Sounds like a good plan…the best I have at the moment, anyway.

I managed to get myself off to a very solid start on NaNoWriMo – or NaNoWrito as it seems to be known in my house – for this year. It took me an hour or so to write my very first word though. I sat down about 11:30am with an espresso and two pieces of vegemite toast and spent the next little while organising the notes and thoughts that I’d jotted down over the last month. It was probably about 1pm before I fired up Microsoft Word, piss-farted about for a little while creating a cool header for the document, then wrote those first two words: “Chapter One” (I love that that counts towards the word count!!)

For someone that finds procrastinating about writing the easiest thing in the world to do, I surprised myself that I was able to sit still for a long enough stretch of time to punch out the first few hundred words. It took about an hour to do 500 words, at which time I thought it was a great time to start bragging to my girlfriend and to make some lunch. I got back into it easily again, and by 5pm, I had written my first 2000 words. And what’s better than that was, I didn’t think those 2000 words were a steaming pile of poo. Now approaching midnight, I did another hour or so of writing to get my word count past 2500 for the first day.

Luckily, the start of NaNoWriMo beginning on a Saturday works in nicely with the Melbourne Cup, a public holiday here in Melbourne on Tuesday. So with a day of annual leave used up for Monday, I have 4 days to get into a solid rhythm with this writing business. My goal (which I’m well on track for at the moment) is to reach 10,000 words by the end of Tuesday. It might take a bit of time, but it’ll be worth it. I’ve got a few weekends away this month – one to Sydney for a friend’s birthday, and another to Shepparton to support my sister do the half-Ironman. So I need to get as many spare words under my belt as I can.