This is the view out our kitchen window. The colors took my breath away.
I’m settling back in after my traveling, not feeling quite so discombobulated anymore. Yesterday, because I got the federal holiday, I was able to get 5,000 words in. I mentioned doing this before, over a weekend, with 5K each day. I do it by writing four 90-minute sessions throughout the day, with breaks in between for walks or household tasks. That means I shoot for about 1,250 words per session, which is a little less than writing at 1K/1Hr. This works really well for me. I find that, in the earlier 90-minute sessions, I might not reach the full 1,250. But by the last couple of sessions, I’m writing much faster and easily make it up.
For those doing the math at home, this also would make for a six-hour working day. If I could do that as a full-time writer, five days a week, that would be very workable for me.
A lot of people are doing NaNoWriMo right now. (National Novel-Writing Month, where you write 50K in the month of November.) It’s a big stretch, even if you’re accustomed to writing regularly. Most people break it out into 1,667 words each day and I’m a big fan of the daily, incremental effort. However, I’ve started keeping track of my monthly wordcounts and discovered I wrote 55,552 words in October – and that 10K weekend made a huge difference in getting there.
The thing is, no matter how you slice it, you have to make sacrifices to get those wordcounts in. The time we spend writing is time we’re not doing something else. When you have a lot of something else’s to get done, that can really pinch.
David, my guy, has long been interested in the teachings of Bob Proctor. (From the same line as Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie.) The other day, he said to me that Proctor’s philosophy is that you always give up your life for something. Whatever you spend your time doing, that’s what you’ve ultimately given your life for.
It made me think. Put that way – what would you give up your life for? Having it be for writing books and stories sounds pretty damn good.
Go NaNo writers!