The wall of time

I was up and running, and then real life ate away at the word count I was steadily building.

Knowing where I'm supposed to be could be a bit nerve-wracking, but I also know how much time I have ahead of me. Certain obligations have been taken care of, others still lurk in the remainder of this month, but the truth of the matter is that I still have sixteen days to finish.

Today, I will be putting aside at least an hour for the nano. I'm hoping it gets me closer to 4,000 words at worst. Time will tell.

I'm still very much excited about this body of work, I've just not had the time for it as yet that I had hoped to somehow find to squeeze it in.

One good thing about being so far behind, it will be a great stimulus to just keep pushing ahead, and to not dwell too much about what is being written.

Onwards!

I can't believe it worked.

I came into the nano project without a clue as to what I'd write about. I have a lot of backburner things that I've just not had time to develop, but I didn't want to limit myself to any of them, nor did I want to get wrapped up trying to find that one shiny penny that I simply must work on.

Instead, what I did was approach the first day with a plain ol' dump session. If it came to mind, I typed it in until life events interrupted me.

The next few days were mostly constructive procrastion days, in which I kept the nano in the back of my head.

Yesterday, I finally got back into the nano. When I opened my file, I saw quite a mess of unrelated goings on. Then I happened to finally get into the forum, to find a thread about posting your first line. So into the mess I dove, and found one line that really stuck with me.

That's what I started with. Yes, I cut and pasted everything to a "dump" file just in case, but I then started the same process from that one sentence.

And off I went. Although I felt weird breaking one of the cardinal rules (no self editing), it felt right, and I ran with it.

Several hours later, I found myself once again dumping almost everything I had written. I'm still not totally clear on how I got to where I'm now running with clear direction, but the jump start I wanted, I got.

I may be behind on the suggested word count, but I'm already making good on catching up. 1/10th of the way that I need to be by midnight tonight to be on par with the target suggestion. Not bad, considering I was down to less than 100 words twice in the last 24 hours, and I took a few days off.

Pressing on...

The biggest time suck of nanowrimo...

...is the website.

I keep forgetting it's near pointless for me to try to actually get into the site most times (unless it's 3am), because the site obviously can't handle the traffic. Still I try, but hopefully some time this week, my brain will finally hone in on the fact that more common hour site usage is a bad idea.

One thing that has been an odd result for me with the nano is that my methods of procrastination as I work out what I want to do is helping me get a lot of other projects done around the house.

I will never understand my penchant for constructive procrastination, but I do sincerely appreciate that I do it all the same.