Twenty... erm... two thousand words

Ok, I'll admit it, I've been slacking off quite a bit on NaNo. Yesterday I had an excuse (had to write a paper for class), but the weekend I had mostly open, and all last week I did a lot of sitting around doing nothing. Yeah, I was kind of down, but I shouldn't have let that slow down my writing, especially since writing is fun and would have made me feel better.

But whatever, that was then, and this is now. I've only got about twenty-two thousand words, which means I'm behind. But I'm not too far behind. And given the pace I've shown I'm capable of in the first week, I can still totally do this. So tomorrow, when I get out of class, I'm going to sit down, open up my computer... and check Facebook. But after that, after the Facebook, then I'll eat lunch. At some point I'll do some writing. My goal is to hit thirty thousand words by Thursday night. That's an average of four thousand words a day in the next two days.

I've got some cool action scenes coming up in the plot, and action scenes write easy, so as long as I sit myself down and make myself write for a few hours a day I shouldn't have too much trouble. I'm going to try to do extra tomorrow, because my Thursdays are usually pretty full. I just have to remember to take some time out to study for an exam next week.

I think I'm going to try to push myself to keep writing daily after NaNo ends. Even just an hour a day, without worrying about wordcount, just to keep me moving throughout the year. I'm not sure how I'll convince myself to do this, but they say that it takes only twenty-one days to get yourself into a new habit. I think I'll spend December pushing myself to write for an hour a day (trying for the same hour every day, maybe 10pm when I'm usually not doing anything). If I can keep it up through December, then in theory it should be easy to keep it up indefinitely.

I'd start the habit-forming now, but for two things. One, starting at the beginning of a calender month gives more of a feeling of structure to the attempt. And two, I foresee a hectic, inconsistent pace of writing through the rest of NaNo for me, which would detract from the attempt to make writing regularly a habit.

I've got two stories competing for my attention after NaNo. One is about a really cool pair of characters that I was eager to write a month ago. The other is a newer idea, much darker with dozens of characters and a much more epic plotline. I'm not sure which I'll start on, but I think it'll be the pair of characters I've already done some planning on. The epic story will have to wait, but in the meantime I'll probably do some idle planning for it. Hopefully I won't lose interest, as I've done with similar stories before.