NaNoWriMo 2018 Progress Report

After getting off to a bang on November 1st and plunging into my goal of writing 50,000 words this month, the enthusiasm has tapered off and now I have hit the halfway mark – November 15th – short of my goal.  I am only a measly 1,235 words behind schedule, which I could write in a half hour if I really focused, but these last few days have been so tough. I thought I would breeze through this year’s Nano attempt since I am officially self-employed, but while I am the master of my schedule, I am not the master of my body, and being 8-months pregnant has taken its toll energy levels and attention span.

So far my writing environment has consisted of:

-       Starbucks (trying to sample all the holiday drinks before the christmas music kicks in and working there becomes unbearable)

-       My house: dining room table and, surprisingly, my office (which is supposed to be a sanctuary for my business)

-       Cafes of Astoria, Or. This year’s “writer’s retreat”  was a little underwhelming, but at least served as a nice escape from the city.

Challenges

-       I don’t have any collaborators this time around. With all the collaboration I'm doing for my consultancy (meeting with other consultants and prospective clients), and all the collaboration I'm doing for my baby  (meeting with other new moms), I don’t feel like investing the energy in meeting new people for Nano right now. I wish I had current friends that are participating but sadly I do not.

-       Pregnancy fatigue is real. While my second trimester was the best I’ve felt in my life, entering the third trimester has made me feel lazy, tired, sluggish, and unmotivated. My mind and body are so synched that when I feel tired, I can’t get up the mental strength to force the create process.

-       I discovered I HATE writing in the midday. Even though  I work for myself and enjoy taking long breaks in the afternoon to read or do housework, it is impossible to write for my novel. I  have to switch gears majorly and can’t get back on focusing to work. Alternatively, if I'm too wrapped up into work, I never get to writing for my novel, it always gets pushed to the evening.

-       Mornings are not working for me either– I cannot wake up that early and when I get up at my regular time, I need to get right to work. People are waiting for my response and I need to be active during business house.

-       Nights were working well but not working this past week. I had two evening events which completely wiped me out, and on the other days, somehow I also didn’t manage to get anything done at night.

Successes

-       I got started right away on day 1 and made good progress. I almost didn’t write that day but I forced myself to because I knew if I couldn’t get this off the ground on the first day, then I would set a sluggish pace for the entire month.

-       I had a conference on November 2nd and didn’t think I would write on that day but I did. In fact, it was a fruitful time for me. The conference was so intense that I welcomed the mental retreat into my novel.

-       I am writing much faster this time around, clocking in more words per minute than I ever had before. I think this is due to having a good outline for my novel already, so I don’t have to get stuck on plot points, as well as just growing more efficient as a writing professional.

-       I kept on track with my word count and wrote almost every day through the 11th of the month.

-       I wrote more on the weekends than I thought, owing to some particularly crucial scenes that needed to be written out all in one sitting.

-       Not too far behind my word count….1,235

-       My novel is structured really well and I’ve been developing a lot of fresh content.

You might notice the word count broken up into segments over the course of the same day. This has to do with the corresponding scenes or chapters, which is helpful for me to track on the more-detailed spreadsheet I keep but don't publish online. 

Day	Date	Comments	Goal Words	Actual Words
Thursday	1		1,000	705
				1,013
Friday	2	Conference		618
				331
Saturday	3	Writers retreat	4,000	666
				1,360
				1,094
				886
Sunday	4	Writers retreat	4,000	1,072
				878
				725
Monday	5		1,000	-
Tuesday	6		1,000	489
				579
				198
				94
				287
Wednesday	7		1,000	76
				761
Thursday	8		1,000	158
				217
Friday	9		1,000	3,343
Saturday	10		4,000	1,386
				2,996
Sunday	11		4,000	1,461
				3,372
Monday	12	Marketing event	1,000
Tuesday	13		1,000	-
Wednesday	14		1,000	-
Thursday	15	Workshop evening	1,000	-

				-
			26,000	24,765

NaNoWriMo: Progress Report Chiang Mai

Evening view from my 10th-floor apartment in Chiang Mai

Hello mid-November!

Sadly, the arrival of Nov. 15th  means NaNoWriMo is halfway over and I feel like it has barely begun. I'm not saying  I haven't been busy, but because I'm doing it alone this year, and because I've already been writing like crazy since the month of August, these past fifteen days have not felt particularly special. However, there was one very profound moment that occurred at a cafe in  Mandalay, which inspired me to keep writing. For weeks I had been feeling very overwhelmed at the prospect of completing this book. I nearly finished it during last year's NaNo, but when it approached completion I got scared and stopped writing. Something about actually completing it was terrifying; I felt unworthy of bearing the fruit of my own artistic labor. As long as it remained unfinished, it could remain unread, and thus un-criticized. But that day in Mandalay I re-read many parts of my novel.  I laughed at certain scenes, while others almost made me cry. Some details surprised me, as though I had forgotten what I wrote. I was almost experiencing it as a new reader, and it was a pleasure to read. I realized that the characters have voices of their own, and they want to be heard. Now that I created them, I feel obliged to them. I have to finish this project for their sake. 

Having just spent two weeks in Myanmar, I am now typing this from my apartment in Chiang Mai, the place that will be my home for the next month. This was where I originally intended to start and finish NaNo, but due to the logistics of my 6-month trip across SE Asia, mid-Nov was the earliest I could get here. 

Challenges:

My "writing room"

1. Sensory Overload: I spent 12 out of these past 15 days in Myanmar. I had no idea how difficult it would be to write there. Myanmar is an amazing experience for the senses, and I found myself writing in my journal for hours each day, but I could not seem to transport myself into the fictional world I created. 
2. Location: In addition to Myanmar exhausting my mental space with all its dazzling and disorienting scenes, I had a really hard time finding comfortable places to write. Not one of the hotels I stayed in had a desk or chair, and I am not comfortable writing from bed. When I want to "get out of the house", I usually go to cafes, but those were few and far between in Myanmar. Only Yangon had a promising cafe scene, which I took advantage of, but Mandalay and Bagan had little to offer in this regard.  
3. Movement: This trip through SE Asia has helped me to reclaim my love of travel, but I've learned that a day on the road, whether it be by bus or train or plane, is draining. In the past fifteen days I have bee on two 15-hr train rides, one 9-hr boat ride, one 9-hr bus ride, and one 1.5-hr plane ride.  It is futile to attempt any creative work while in motion, and when I arrive I am usually too drained to work on anything for the remainder of the day. That's five days where I have basically been useless.
4. Content: Since I am continuing to work one my first novel - the one for which  I wrote over 50,000 words  during NaNo 2013 - I am facing challenges writing new content. Basically, the entire novel has already been written, it just needs some heavy editing and some reworking as I piece it together. LAst year I made a list of scenes that had not been written, so I was able to focus on those during each writing session, but this time I have no such list, and instead I am revisiting certain scenes and reworking them, which results in a lower word count and is more time-consuming. 

Successes

1.  I am more or less on track! Although I deeply underestimated how hard it would be to write in Myanmar, I managed to make up for it in a few power-sessions.

2.  I have totally reworked the sequence of events in the novel, which has helped build suspense in certain areas, and been conducive to moving the plot forward.

3.  I redeveloped two main characters to enrich their personalities and lives in the stories. They are not as one-dimensional and stagnant as they once were. 

4. I have learned more about myself as a storyteller and I believe my skills have increased. 

Progress Report

Day	Date	Comments	Goals Words	Actual Words
Saturday	1	Yangon	2000	1097
Sunday	2	train to Mandalay	1000	2216
Monday	3	Mandalay	2000	0
Tuesday	4	Mandalay	2000	0
Wednesday	5	Mandalay	2000	???
Thursday	6	Boat to Bagan	1000	0
Friday	7	Bagan	2000	0
Saturday	8	Bagan	2000	2888
Sunday	9	Bagan	2000	0
Monday	10	bus to Yangon	1000	0
Tuesday	11	Yangon	0	2182
Wednesday	12	fly to Bangkok	0	0
Thursday	13	train to ChiangMai	1000	1318
Friday	14	Chiang Mai	0	7002
Saturday	15	Chiang Mai	2000	1520

Goals Word Count: 20,000

Current Word Count: 18,223

Difference: 1,777