NaNo . . . (sigh) . . . WriMo

I think I'm like five pretty productive days from finishing this damned thing. My frustration today is mostly centered on the fact that I realized several days ago that it's unlikely that what I'm working on will be interesting enough to me to flesh out and edit, to push and prod into a workable manuscript that I might one day consider a finished novel.

I'm sure this is all still worthwhile, but I have things I'd really like to be writing right now, and my NaNo thing isn't really one of them, as is indicated by the tiny increases over the last couple of days. I now have two other books and a play sitting on the back burner, which I'm not working on for the same reason I didn't start my novel until the 6th: I feel guilty working on a project while facing a deadline on another. I tend to be a bit of an extremist about things, and if I have something I'm supposed to accomplish by such and such a time, everything else I might do feels like I'm just wasting time or stalling. Including all of my genuine stalling and time-wasting, but also including the writing of another novel while I'm supposed to be finishing this one.

So I resolved today to just push through as fast as I can, finish the goal and spend my time on something I might like to actually let someone read someday. Keeping this in mind, I cranked out 3,500 words in three hours. And I'll keep trying for 3,000 words each day until I'm done.

The other milestone today is that I reached page 100, although that's not an accurate way to gauge anything, since formatting plays such a huge role in page count. At the formatting I started with, I'd have passed that particular mark quite some time ago.

There are still a lot of good lessons from this exercise, and when it's all over I'll do a post about some of the things I thought were great about my involvement. Until then, it's back to the grindstone.