Who am I kidding?

[saxikath]

Let's just stop a minute here and look at my November.

• I'm working full-time in-house on a couple different projects, and will be for at least the next couple of weeks. One project had me in the office on Saturday.
  
• I have two other outside freelance editing jobs to do.
  
• I'm in a show that goes up the weekend before Thanksgiving, for which, among other things, I need to buy or make some costume pieces. (And for which I have rehearsals twice a week, until production week when it'll be basically every night.)
  
• I have handbell rehearsal every week.
  
• I'm playing piano for rehearsals for another show once a week.
  
• The last Legends event of the season is this coming weekend, and I have some things I need to do before then.
  
• My mother's visiting around Thanksgiving.
  
• I desperately need to get back to the gym.
  
• Oh, yeah, and I'm getting sick. I've been coughing since yesterday, and my voice is a mess.
  

And I thought I was going to write 1700 words a day of a novel on top of this? What was I thinking?? It's true that, as my mother once said, multitasking and I have always been synonymous, but even I have limits.

I still think Finding Danny is a good idea for a story, but I'm not at all convinced it's going to get written this month. *sigh*

I don't think I'm just being my lazy, depressive self with this. I'm looking at my upcoming weeks and wondering how I'm going to get done everything I need to do, never mind adding NaNoWriMo to the mix.

Any advice?

Comments

[davehogg.livejournal.com]

Let's see if I can sympathize:

For my MCFN job, I have a post-election spending report to research and write. For my AP job, I have three Lions games, eight high-school football games, seven Pistons games, two college basketball games and eight Lions off-day stories to write.

Yeah, I guess I can feel your pain. :)

So my advice to you is to do what I'm doing - write. Am I going to have 50,000 words by November 30? I don't know, and I don't care. I'm not going to even try to write 1,700 words a day. Some days, I'll be lucky to write 100 and maybe some days I will write 3,000.

I'm enjoying it, and I'm enjoying being part of a bigger thing. And, as usual, you being a part of it makes it more enjoyable.

So don't write to get to 50,000 words. Write to have fun. When you get exhausted, stop. When you have energy, let things flow.

[jadelennox]

when i heard first about nanomowrnododorunrunbibbitybobbityboo, I though "what a cool idea! structure! could work for me! ... but not this month." If at some point I have fewer balls in my juggling bag, I might try to recreate that structure. But for now, don't turn yourself into a stress basket. Maybe sometime in march we can do our own private nowrimo. for now, chill. Be happy.

[crossfire.livejournal.com]

I chose not to do it this month because I'm busy writing 10-12 pages a day creating a new user's manual for some software. I really don't want to stretch myself that much.

That being said, November is a really bad month to do this anyway, because of the impending holidays. I mean, 40,000 words in 30 days means you're going to have to crank out about 1340 words a day on average. That's a lot of work.

My advice is to write on it as much as you can, and then hold your own novel writing month some other time.

[greyman.livejournal.com]

My suggestion would be to change your goal to writing 5,000 words, and to make those words a somewhat fleshy outline of Finding Danny. Do this early in the month, say by Friday the 8th if possible.

Then you'd know the complete story arc, and have something you could reuse later. Of course, if you get it done early in the month, you still have time to tinker with it and add words here and there during the month.

I bet that 5000 words is more than 90% of the people who signed up will accomplis

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

If your schedule can't hack it, then NaNoWriMo isn't for you. Frankly, the fact that umpty-'leven other people are doing something at a particular time isn't really a compelling reason for you to follow suit. On the other hand, I don't think you should abandon Danny either--so I hereby declare December to be KaNoWriMo. (For "December" read "some month of your choice, not more than six months from now.") 'Kay?

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

What jadelennox (and a few others) said. Why not just make some other month your own personal NaNoWriMo?

several suggestions.....

[kayre]

.. any of which I hereby authorize you to follow or modify without any guilt whatsoever, just in case you need someone to say that to you :) 1) Stop. Forget about it. Pat yourself on the back every time you read LJs from those of us stressing about it. 2) What Dave said: Keep writing. Do what you can, and don't worry about word count or deadline. 3) What Grey said. Make it your goal to thoroughly outline your novel this month; LJ entries will give you ideas of what kind of planning will be truly helpful. This may work for you, since I notice that most of the busy-ness you mention is time-intensive rather than thought-intensive. Spend your workouts at the gym pondering, and 15 minutes when you can spare them making notes. I also definitely with NaNo was a different month... March, maybe.

From the linguist/nitpicker

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd suggest you stop trying to be synonymous--words are good at it, but it's not the sort of thing that comes naturally to actual people.

(And, you know, what they said above.) I'm actually mildly curious: is "writing a 5000 word outline" contrary to the spirit of NaNoWriMo? It seems like everyone I know who's doing it is taking the approach "write the next N words each day until it's done" as opposed to, say, the more typical approaches to writing a novel.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I must add that when I started hearing about NaNoWriMo (hereinafter to be pronounced "nano-rhyme-o"), I entertained the notion only long enough to think, "Gee, I suppose that *could* provide the kick in the butt I need... but on the other hand, no WAY is this November the month for it!"

If what you really want out of it is structure and community and motivation, more than the one-month-to-full-draft process experience... what say we start a writers' group? *After* Thanksgiving? :-)

[saxikath]

Now this, I could get into. :) Let's definitely talk more about this after Thanksgiving. (May have to wait till after mid-January... there's this Mystery Hunt thing... :) )

Seriously, thanks to everyone for all your suggestions. I'm glad my fellow Nano'ers don't think I'm a spineless wimp for getting scared only three days in.

[drdemure.livejournal.com]

Well, last year, we missed the deadline to sign up completely, so this year we were a little more primed. Here I was feeling guilty because I'm somewhat ahead of schedule, and then had to work today and fell behind. Grey wanted to delete everything he'd written the first couple of days, and I encouraged him not to. Now he's five thousand words ahead of me. I think I'd just say, write as much as you can. Write just because it's November and everyone else is writing, and see what happens. Don't dip out of the fray. Just dip in as much as you can. :)