Yesterday was a day of many distractions. My early Christmas present — a new (to me, used to my Dad’s neighbors) grill arrived. Yay! We had fun setting it up and then I had to run to CostCo and get propane, clean it up and try it out. Plus, some usual stuff, answering emails and paying bills. Plus, too many hours spent on the formatting project. I still had one long writing stretch that netted me about 250 words, but I couldn’t break through a patch where I didn’t quite know what happened.
And today–well, I might manage to break through it today, but I have a lot I want to get done and writing is not going to be my priority. In fact, for the next three days, I’m not going to worry about writing. Whatever small chain of days I had accumulated gets broken and on Monday, I’m back to zero. Sometimes life gets in the way of writing and sometimes it takes precedence. This weekend is one of those precedence ones. I’m doing a workshop, gone tomorrow from early in the morning until late at night. If I’m going to stick to my crazy diet–which I am–then today I need to cook all my meals for it, so I can bring them along. That means a big chunk of hours spent in the kitchen.
I also really want to finish the formatting of Ghosts and start the formatting of Thought. Well, I’d like to finish the formatting of Thought, but I don’t know yet how hard it’s going to be. Yesterday I had a major disaster with my formatting, wiping out all the work I had done during the day, so today I’ll be recovering from that and moving on. It might take me two hours, it might take me eight. But those are my goals for the day: cook all the meals for the weekend, format Ghosts so that I can get the version with the new cover up on all the sites, not just Amazon. Anything else is gravy.
On Monday, day zero begins and I start over. AND! I sign up for NaNoWriMo. Maybe this year can be the year that the pressure doesn’t make me shut down and I let my fingers fly.
I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year too. But this time I’m not making any grand declarations. No more big lines drawn in the sand. NaNo already has it’s own goal set for us. That’s fine with me. If I can just get into a daily routine of writing and rediscover my mojo…THAT will be my success. My mind is too quiet when I sit down to write these days. It’s my fault for avoiding it and making excuses for two years. Time to get my mojo back!! Good luck with your formatting issues.
Fifty thousand words in a month is plenty ambitious. My one change to the NaNo thing will be that I keep working on my WIP instead of starting something new. But I am going to be trying to let go of my perfectionism and just make it through the word count. It’ll be hard!
I did nano a couple of years. Don’t know if I should attempt it this year or not. Seems like there will be lots of good company, though.