NaNoWriMo Progress Report

Me in my winter spot

Well, I'm 15 days into November and halfway through NaNoWriMo. My goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of this month. 

Just a quick update. I'm more or less on track, but about 4 hours or 4,715 words behind schedule.

Here are a few notes on my challenges and successes so far: 

Challenges:

1. Lack of creativity and inspiration: I anticipated that this would be a problem, given that I’ve written so little in the last few years. This is basically what I face every day when I sit down staring at my computer screen thinking, “I really don’t know what to say.” To remedy this issue, I’ve started outlining scenes that need to be written in advance, so that I don’t have to waste precious writing time.  
2. Lack of energy to write. Too many nights this month I’ve sat down at my computer at 11:00 pm with every intent to write 2,00 words and instead fallen asleep after 300...or none. The fact is, it takes energy to write, especially after a long day at work when my social capacity is drained, and entering into a world of my own creation is just too exhausting.
3. Lack of time to write. I thought I wouldn’t encounter this issue since I scheduled my writing time out for the whole month. Pacing myself with a reasonable word count per day and even allowing for days when I knew I would have little free time. Well, we all know that’s not how life works. Actually, things unexpectedly come up and woops, there goes your weekend. I am also not willing to give up socializing and running each day...

Successes

1.   Haven’t wasted any time. Once I realized that I needed to plan out my topics and scenes ahead of time, this saved me precious minutes staring blankly at the computer screen .

2.  Got a lot of organizing done. My digital writing folder went from fragments, paragraphs, and random quotes on ambiguously-named documents to being sorted, organized, and in chronological order of the story.

3.  Been pretty disciplined. I have been more or less sticking to the schedule time-wise and word-count wise. I have let my lack of time and energy get the best of me, so I am slightly behind, but as of today it seems I will be able to catch up by next week!


Progress Report

The kotatsu

Day	Date	Comments	Goals Words	Actual Words
Friday	1	work	1000	996
Saturday	2	work	1000	1011
Sunday	3	work	1000	0
Monday	4	no work!	4000	4591
Tuesday	5	no work!	4000	0
Wednesday	6	Late night	500	2007
Thursday	7	work	1000	0
Friday	8	Hiroshima	3000	2405
Saturday	9	Hiroshima	3000	2997
Sunday	10	Hiroshima	3000	0
Monday	11	work	1000	438
Tuesday	12	work	1000	2261
Wednesday	13	Late night	500	959
Thursday	14	Business trip	0	1620
Friday	15	Business Trip	0	0

Goals Word Count: 24,000

Current Word Count: 19,285

Difference: 4,715

My writing haven: the kotatsu. November in Japan brought with it some freezing cold temperatures, so I have been basically living under the kotatsu, which is a heated table with a blanket sandwiched in between two plies of wood. The blanket helps keep the heat in, so I can write warmly for hours...