NaNoWriMo — Update + No Excuses Saturday

I’m dubbing today No Excuses Saturday.  It sounds really good but fails to take into account that I woke at 7am and promptly laid in bed for almost three hours (yes, you read that correctly, I said “almost THREE HOURS”) listening to an audiobook and playing a sort of updated version of Tetris.

(The audiobook, by the way, is The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.  If you like fantasy, I highly recommend it.)

Final Word Count on NaNoWriMo

Here’s how my NaNoWriMo ended up:

As you can see, I *almost* made it.  I fell less than 3,000 words short of my goal.  And if you look at the spot where I started to fall behind, you’ll see that it lines up with Thanksgiving week.

I was going to use it as an excuse, to say, “Well, it *was* Thanksgiving, after all…”

But that’s why today is officially “No Excuses Saturday.”  I’m not going to make any excuses for NaNoWriMo.  I fell short not because I was too busy, not because of Thanksgiving, but because I spent a week sidetracked while I played Civilization 5, in which my Japanese emperor eventually lost to the Arabs anyway.  Oh well.

However, in the interest of following my girlfriend’s advice of not always being so hard on myself, I will say this:  I think 47,657 words in one month might be the most I’ve ever done.  And it’s proof that my goal of turning out four decent novels every year isn’t that ridiculous.  On the days when I focused without distraction (*cough* without Civilization 5 *cough*), I usually hit my word count goal within about two hours of diligent work.

So… Onward

As I round the corner into December, I’m almost 75,000 words into The Redevelopment of Drea and Kasey.  (Still waiting to see if a better title occurs to me, since that one’s a mouthful.)  Since I normally write a novel of about 95,000 words, the goal is to finish the first draft of the book before Christmas, and then spend a good 3 – 4 weeks editing.  All of which means, hopefully, a late January release date.

Eat… Sleep… Slay Dragons

I have yet to line up a cover artist, and I have some other random, administrative things to do yet, but I feel like I’m making progress against the very hardest part of writing:  The psychological game.

What every serious writer eventually realizes is that the hardest part of writing isn’t the daily word count, the ideas that truly sparkle, character or plot development.  The hardest part of writing is beating all the demons that that try to stop you from doing it in the first place.

Procrastination… self-doubt… self-hate… fear… or, as Steven Pressfield calls it in The War of Art (great little book, by the way) — Resistance.

No matter what you call it, that’s the only dragon a writer has to slay.

Anyway… here’s wishing you a happy Saturday from slightly-less-sunny-than-usual Southern California.