In my last post I’d been optimistic about making it through week three of NaNoWriMo after really struggling through week two. I think I might have jinxed myself. My normal day job has been extremely busy the last couple weeks. At the start of the month I got a pretty big promotion which I’m really excited about. Unfortunately until I can hire my replacement for my old role, I essentially have to do two jobs at the moment. Last week I pretty much worked non-stop from 9am-6pm everyday with maybe five minutes of free time to scarf down lunch. A couple days I had to work past 6pm. This left me mentally tapped out. I tried to write a couple times but it just wasn’t happening. I wrote maybe 1,000 words all week.
I have a tendency to burn both ends of the candle which is something I’m aware of and I’m trying to get better about. So I gave myself a pass on writing this week. I’m still sitting at around 28,000 and I have four days off for Thanksgiving. We have family in town but it should be relatively low-key so I’m hoping to get back into the writing flow over those days and see how many words I can bang out. My goal is to hit 40,000 words by the end of the month with a stretch goal of that 50,000. Technically I don’t have to have the draft done until February because that’s when I hand it over to my editor but I’d like together it done by end of December so that I have all of January to make a quick pass over it. We’ll see how it goes.
Even with the crashing and burning this week I’m still really happy that I decided to do NaNoWriMo this year. It’s a fun way to kickstart a new book. I’m still not sure if I’ll do it next year just because of timing. I might be halfway through writing a book in November of next year and I’d rather do NaNoWriMo at the start of book. Next time I do it I might try to plan ahead a little more with my day job (which will hopefully be less crazy soon) and maybe take a few days off in November to help give me more time to write. I got a little bit of writing done today and now I’m working on some notes for the narrator who is going to start recording A Shift in Shadows soon! I also just realized when I was looking at ACX that I need to figure out the cover for the audiobook since it has to a square not a rectangular. Shouldn’t take me long to fix something up but still another thing to add to the “To Do” list. Yay.