The last two months flew by in a blur. Of course it's not always easy to get a routine started, especially that I had more than 2 weeks vacation in there between, but I really haven't gotten forward at the pace I was expecting to. I was hoping to be finishing the first draft of one of the stories by now, but I've barely written anything in the time I've been here.
The biggest problem has probably been my inability to concentrate on any one story. Coming here, I had three stories I wanted to do: two that I just had written the beginning to and one that I had already written some 35000 words (77 pages in Word), but that I considered to be complete shit (the other two I actually liked). On top of that, I found from an old notebook a story I had started to write in Finnish some 7 years ago and thought would actually be kind of nice to finish, and then a couple of weeks ago my boyfriend gave me the idea for yet another story, that I just had to start writing. So 5 stories all together.
To solve the problem of concentration and procrastination, I decided to participate nanowrimo, national novel writing month. It's an event where hundreds of thousands of people around the world try to write a 50 000 word novel in one month (November). The idea is, that to be able to write at such a fast pace (1667 words per day), you have to say goodbye to your inner editor that's usually keeping you from writing by telling you you're not good enough or the text is not good enough. By no means are you supposed to have a finished novel in your hands by the end of the month, but a first draft, that you can start to work on after November (read more in www.nanowrimo.org).
To have the best chance of succeeding in this challenge, I decided I should go with a story I have prepared the most, so I decided on the story I started to write already in 2005. The plot was in no way complete in my head, but at least I knew approximately where it was headed as opposed to the other stories I'm writing. You can read the introduction here.
The challenge started on 1st of Nov, and I got a good head start writing over 5200 words during the first day. But now it's only the third day, and already I'm starting to slow down. It feels like such a struggle to get the words on paper, and even though I decided I would just keep on writing no matter how bad I thought the writing was, I'm finding it increasingly difficult. This is in no way helped by the fact that my friend participating the challenge seems to be able to mystically produce incredibly awesome text at the flick of her wrist at the same pace that I'm writing text that would need to be taken through ten top class editors and it still probably wouldn't be as good as hers naturally is. I know I shouldn't compare, but it's hard not to.
However, I better get back to my writing board. The official goal for the weekend would be at 6667 words, but since I've already passed that, my goal is to reach 10 000 words. The faster I get the writing done, the faster I'll be able to edit this chaos of a novel. So, 400 more words to go tonight (leaving 2500 for tomorrow). Doesn't sound like much, but at the pace I'm going right now, it could take hours. (Although I'm motivated by the thought I'll get to reward myself with another episode of Ringer as soon as I'm done writing.)
