Since I’m behind on the recommended word count, I’ve been setting my own goals. Both so I have daily targets to hit and in an attempt to get caught up gradually (rather than trying a single marathon day of writing).
By day 8, I should have 13,336. My goal for the weekend was 5k, but I ended up stopping 600 words short. I decided to take a couple of hours where I’d intended to write and play some video games instead, and I’m glad I did. I hadn’t played at all last week, so I feel pretty good about treating myself on Sunday.
My goal for today was 8k words. I squeezed in a bit of writing today during breaks at work, and I’m at 5065 words now. I doubt I’ll make a full 8k tonight, but I feel like I’ve been making steady progress so I’m pretty pleased, I’ll be happy with 7k by the time I go to bed.
Keep it up!
I was thinking of doing nano this year, but by the time I started seriously considering it I figured it was already too late if I’m not already mentally prepared by then. My problem is that I can write a whole lot but can never manage to come up with a conclusion for any of my story ideas (case in point, a 200k-word story draft that’s been sitting in my hard drive that’s still going). If I participate next year, maybe I should take a look at that No Plot No Problem book you were reading before I tackle a new project.
Wow, sounds like you’re writing war and peace. I used to have a similar problem where I would come up with a setting and characters, but couldn’t come up with a conflict. I guess I didn’t want to mess up their lives.
I’ve found No Plot, No Problem pretty helpful, I would recommend getting the Kindle version (which I’m sure you would do anyway) just for the ability to make annotations and to be able to easily review them later. I’d actually bought the paper version last year, but it didn’t arrive until December and it sat in my to read pile over the summer. I started it this fall while I was preparing for November, but I ended up buying the Kindle version for the reasons I mentioned above.
So did you get to 7K? I bet you broke the 8K barrier!
I actually didn’t do any writing last night, but I ended up catching up today.