I have never had this much difficulty with National Novel Writing Month.
Well, not for this long. There have been a couple of attempts when things didn’t go well at all, but I generally accepted the circumstances early on and gave up.
I’m not giving up this time. Every single day, I am convinced that it’s just not going to happen—I’m not going to meet my day’s targets, and I’m not going to hit 50,000 words by the 30th. Every single day, I sit down to write anyway and surprise myself by getting the words down without too much difficulty. Writing (nearly) daily for the last couple of years has paid off—even though I’ve been beating myself up the last little while, when I actually do manage to sit down and write, I don’t end up staring at a blank page for hours on end.
I’m still not sure I’m going to win this year. My schedule keeps shifting around, and I keep finding out about days when I won’t have an opportunity to write. And my motivation isn’t what it should be. I’ve pretty much decided that novels aren’t my medium, and I’m more than fine with that (I’ve been having moments of giddiness, actually, thinking about the possibilities I’m opening myself up to), but it’s making it difficult to focus.
Still. I hit 14,000 words this week. I think Act One came to a reasonable conclusion, and I think I know where the story’s going to go next—in the short term, if not the long term. Writing’s a one-day-at-a-time thing for me right now. I just need to get through the next three weeks.
