Decided to practice writing my NaNo daily pace today to see how it felt. It wasn’t easy and it’s going to be a real challenge to do it every single day for a month. I’ve learned from bitter experience that the marathon is so much harder than the sprint.

I learned some things to watch out for:

• Writing stories I don’t care about that much is at least 3x as hard as writing something I enjoy. I can do it, it just takes longer. The procrastination demon gleefully loves the ‘meh’ stories and I really need to practice focusing. I waste so much time on this and it’s unnecessary and needs to stop.
• It is way too easy to stop writing, when I reach a good stopping point like the end of a chapter. I need to find a way to push through that, and not waste a ton of time trying to convince myself to restart and write more.

Tomorrow I’m going to do this again but try a couple of different things:

• When I reach the end of a chapter and start procrastinating (like I’m actually doing now), I’m going to swap to a different project, and see if that gets me going again any quicker.
• On the meh stories I’m going to either take them scene by scene, and swap to something else in between. That way I only have to do small chunks in one go, which should be less boring and easier to knock out faster. Or if the scene is taking forever, I’ll just spend 20 minutes or something, and then switch.

Then on Monday – I’ll do it again!
Only I’ll have to work as well. Let’s see how that goes, when I don’t have all day to play with. I’m thinking it will be interesting to say the least. However, this is why I’m practicing and building it up. Today I’m finding out what my trouble points are, tomorrow I’m seeing if I can fix them, then Monday I put it into practice and then I’ll take it from there.

Naturally, I should at some point plan my actual projects for NaNo. However, there’s still a few weeks left, and I have a lot to finish writing this month before NaNo starts, so one thing at a time 🙂