NaNo 2006 Day 26: The end is nigh November 26, 2006
So… tired… can’t… type… anymore…
I cracked the 38k mark not that long ago, and I should keep going, yet the fatigue is making it hard to type. Plus, it’s really late. I know, I know - my excuses are pathetic. But I’ve done a lot of writing this weekend, and I learned an important lesson this week.
What I learned is that it’s no good to tell myself that I will sit down for half an hour and bang something out. It’s all well and good to set a time limit, but how much you get accomplished varies from time to time. Sometimes I can write almost 800 words, others I’m lucky if I manage 20.
Now when I sit down, I say, “Self, if you ever want to eat dinner/watch TV/go to bed, you must produce 500/1000 words.” I’ve found this to be much more effective because I know that no matter how long it takes, I will have over 500 words written, then I will go do something for a little while and come back to it later.
So far it’s worked well, if you’re going by sheer quantity. If you actually expect them to be 500 words that make sense or move the plot along, go talk to someone else. I whimpered through a good 250 words about frozen cow embryos tonight - I wanted to stop, and the best way to hit my target was to explain why this character had seven crates of frozen cow embryos, and what he was going to do with them (sell them to another farmer). Does it have any bearing on anything else? No, not really. But it was 250 words, so I’m not going to question it too much.
Other news!
I went on a craft crawl today, and at one of the stops I met members of the local knitter’s guild. They were quite keen, and happy to meet someone around their age who shared a love of fancy yarns. As I put it, I’m in the “acrylic is crap” phase, which is good. Other things I found: a photographer with some very cool photos, which I need to find frames for, and a necklace.
That’s it for tonight!
Leave a Reply