NaNoWriMo-ish (the end of November)
Dec. 2nd, 2019 12:40 pmAs I mentioned at the start of the month, I do like to set myself writing goal/s for the month of November, even if I'm nowhere near conditions under which I could participate in actual NaNoWriMo. This year is particularly full of hard real-life stuff, so my goals for November were quite modest:
– write every day
– maybe reach 10,000 words if possible
Now, with November wrapped up and over, I'm happy to report: GOALS ACHIEVED.
I DID write every day, and I DID meet and exceed my modest word count goal!
In fact, I met the 10,000-word goal 2/3 through the month, on Nov. 20 (fittingly, this was while I was away on a writing retreat and thus having a particularly good word count day) so I kept on and decided my stretch goal would be a rather vague "finish somewhere between 10,000–15,000 words." I finished the month with a total of 14,075 words, so, yay!
Once again, I made the questionable choice to focus mostly on short fics, several of which I was also revising and getting ready to post during that time, so obviously that creates many fewer new words than working only on the rough first draft of one long project, like NaNoWriMo is meant to be. If I ever do actual NaNoWriMo, I do need to pick one actual long NaNoWriMo-style project.
But, whatever. I wrote what I wanted to write. :-) (And, in fact, also made a bunch of progress on a back-burner longer fic as well.) And once again, having that push to meet a word count did lead to entire fics I probably wouldn't have written otherwise. (Including writing a treat for Remus/Sirius Small Gifts for the first time – I was feeling suddenly nostalgic this winter, and swung back towards R/S fandom – as well as trying to at least get a start on some treats for Yuletide, maybe.)
Also, normally I only include fiction/creative writing in the month's word count. (Not any of the copious other writing I'm always also doing, like journaling, or blogging, or writing up my thoughts about books for my quarterly book posts, etc.) But this year it's exceedingly important that I work on my thesis and don't let myself get distracted from that by things that are more fun, so I counted that as part of the word count, too, as a way of encouraging myself to do it.
Oh, and the retreat with my writers' group was great. Two nights in a remote state park, where we each had our own little cabin and spent the days writing. I did a bunch of fun fic writing; but also, that was where I finally had the space and focus to pick up my thesis again, and delve into it enough to even remember what I'd been working on before I went on an unintended two-month hiatus to manage the latest family health crisis. It felt really good to remember, oh, right, this is what I was working on. This is what I was going to write next. Oh, hey, now I remember that I actually really like this project!
During and after the retreat, a few of us were also talking about the dynamics of who dares to bring work to the group to read and critique and who doesn't. (It's a very, very laidback group, not really a critique group at all, with no formal structure. So that means the only people whose work gets read are those who take the initiative to bring work, even though it's not required or assigned. And unfortunately the one who dares is mainly one specific man; and there's at least one woman who feels intimidated and never dares.)
So I proposed that at our next meeting we ALL bring a snippet of something we wrote during the retreat – because that way everyone wrote something, probably at more or less the same rough-draft level, so there's no dithering about whether your work is worth sharing: just, everyone is bringing something, so you bring something. We'll see if that helps or not!
(Also, whoops, that means now I have to bring something... Everyone else in this group is a nonfiction writer, from memoir to journalism to blogging, and then there's me turning up and trying to explain fanfiction to them. (And yes, also sometimes original fiction, but I just don't have the brain space for anything new/original right now.) So, having promised to share something I wrote during the retreat, I have to bring them either an incredibly dry snippet of my thesis, or else some excerpt of a fic they're totally not going to understand out of context.)
So, my November was good for writing! Exhausting, but good.
– write every day
– maybe reach 10,000 words if possible
Now, with November wrapped up and over, I'm happy to report: GOALS ACHIEVED.
I DID write every day, and I DID meet and exceed my modest word count goal!
In fact, I met the 10,000-word goal 2/3 through the month, on Nov. 20 (fittingly, this was while I was away on a writing retreat and thus having a particularly good word count day) so I kept on and decided my stretch goal would be a rather vague "finish somewhere between 10,000–15,000 words." I finished the month with a total of 14,075 words, so, yay!
Once again, I made the questionable choice to focus mostly on short fics, several of which I was also revising and getting ready to post during that time, so obviously that creates many fewer new words than working only on the rough first draft of one long project, like NaNoWriMo is meant to be. If I ever do actual NaNoWriMo, I do need to pick one actual long NaNoWriMo-style project.
But, whatever. I wrote what I wanted to write. :-) (And, in fact, also made a bunch of progress on a back-burner longer fic as well.) And once again, having that push to meet a word count did lead to entire fics I probably wouldn't have written otherwise. (Including writing a treat for Remus/Sirius Small Gifts for the first time – I was feeling suddenly nostalgic this winter, and swung back towards R/S fandom – as well as trying to at least get a start on some treats for Yuletide, maybe.)
Also, normally I only include fiction/creative writing in the month's word count. (Not any of the copious other writing I'm always also doing, like journaling, or blogging, or writing up my thoughts about books for my quarterly book posts, etc.) But this year it's exceedingly important that I work on my thesis and don't let myself get distracted from that by things that are more fun, so I counted that as part of the word count, too, as a way of encouraging myself to do it.
Oh, and the retreat with my writers' group was great. Two nights in a remote state park, where we each had our own little cabin and spent the days writing. I did a bunch of fun fic writing; but also, that was where I finally had the space and focus to pick up my thesis again, and delve into it enough to even remember what I'd been working on before I went on an unintended two-month hiatus to manage the latest family health crisis. It felt really good to remember, oh, right, this is what I was working on. This is what I was going to write next. Oh, hey, now I remember that I actually really like this project!
During and after the retreat, a few of us were also talking about the dynamics of who dares to bring work to the group to read and critique and who doesn't. (It's a very, very laidback group, not really a critique group at all, with no formal structure. So that means the only people whose work gets read are those who take the initiative to bring work, even though it's not required or assigned. And unfortunately the one who dares is mainly one specific man; and there's at least one woman who feels intimidated and never dares.)
So I proposed that at our next meeting we ALL bring a snippet of something we wrote during the retreat – because that way everyone wrote something, probably at more or less the same rough-draft level, so there's no dithering about whether your work is worth sharing: just, everyone is bringing something, so you bring something. We'll see if that helps or not!
(Also, whoops, that means now I have to bring something... Everyone else in this group is a nonfiction writer, from memoir to journalism to blogging, and then there's me turning up and trying to explain fanfiction to them. (And yes, also sometimes original fiction, but I just don't have the brain space for anything new/original right now.) So, having promised to share something I wrote during the retreat, I have to bring them either an incredibly dry snippet of my thesis, or else some excerpt of a fic they're totally not going to understand out of context.)
So, my November was good for writing! Exhausting, but good.