Just a very short one today to show off my 40,000 NaNoWriMo word reward.
An anthurium:
And yes, it has warmed up quite a bit today to 0 degrees fahrenheit. Super balmy after last week’s minus 60 wind chill. Downright tropical!
I am feverishly writing to catch up so I can get to 50,000 words tomorrow.
Wish me luck!
Progress:
Day 29 Word Count: 1177
Total Word Count: 40280
Where I Planned to Be: 48000
1667 words per day: 48343
Tomorrow’s going to be a doozy!
Another weekly NaNoWriMo check-in!
Word Count Goal Per Writing Day: 2000
Actual Average Word Count Per Writing Day: 2918
Planned Writing Days: 6
Planned Writing Days: 4
Day 15 Word Count: 0
Day 16 Word Count: 0
Day 17 Word Count: 719
Day 18 Word Count: 3005
Day 19 Word Count: 0
Day 20 Word Count: 3896
Day 21 Word Count: 4050
Planned Words This Week: 12000
Actual Words This Week: 11670
Planned Words So Far: 36000
Actual Words So Far: 28010
I was so close to my word goal this week!
Again, I wrote less days than I intended. Maybe 4 days a week is my process? But, I also had much bigger word counts per day than I planned. They were not enough to catch me up, but they are definitely moving me closer.
How did Week 3 go for you?
But it’s November!
I cry, as life gallops on
Word count in the dust
Life, amirite?
Maybe it was crazy for me to think that I would write a novel in a month and also blog about it every day. It turns out that life decided it was going to keep happening even though I made those plans! I mean, come on!
So the blogs have fallen by the wayside, as I have been trying as hard as possible to focus on the novel, and I am even behind in that.
But! I am not down and out. I am still going to for the 50,000 words this month. And, I do think it’s important to note that even as I write this sad little ditty about falling off the NaNo horse, this is still one of my best months of the year in terms of word count.
Still moving forward, still getting words down, still trying to document it.
How about you? Are you still on track? Still motivated? Already have your novel done and dusted?
My Week 1 Review for NaNoWriMo 2021. Here’s how the numbers broke down.
Word Count Goal Per Writing Day: 2000
Actual Average Word Count Per Writing Day: 1615
Planned Writing Days: 6
Planned Writing Days: 6
Day 1 Word Count: 2042
Day 2 Word Count: 2037
Day 3 Word Count: 1089
Day 4 Word Count: 1516
Day 5 Word Count: 420
Day 6 Word Count: 2646
Day 7 Word Count: 0
Planned Words This Week: 12000
Actual Words This Week: 9750
So, this feels like good, important information to have. I had been feeling like I hadn’t written enough days this week, but in actuality, I wrote the number of days I had planned, taking Sunday off instead of Friday.
But I still didn’t meet my word count because on the days that I did write, I didn’t reach my daily goal. I probably should have figured that since I did not write enough to get my daily rewards on a lot of writing days.
Well, so now I know. I’ll be trying to catch up by encouraging myself that I can do just one more sprint each day, past the point where I might have called it a night.
Another one of the things I love about NaNoWriMo, I guess. It pushes you in ways that make you learn about your process as a writer. Trying to get back on the horse and gallop a little more each day!
Hopefully this little reflection on the stats will help me be a more consistent writer next week.
How did your Week 1 go? Can you believe we are halfway through Week 2 already?!
As I am falling, I can tell there is more than snow. There is the supple bend of life, clouds of green that I pass through as I fall, and the uneven jaggedness of growth. But the snow consumes me anyway, pulling me into its murky thickness. It is so dense that I cannot breathe the air between the snowflakes.
And then I hit ground. Real, hard, brown frozen ground. It seems impossible. When was the last time my feet touched ground? My hands touched the earth?
But the snow is slipping. It’s sliding down toward me and I move away from it, against the middle of the space.
And then I realize. It is a trunk against my back, the brittle familiarity of its mottled bark. It clings to me, to my clothes, as the snow rushes toward me and stops. I turn to look at the tree, and there is something odd about it. A wave around the trunk is darker than the rest of the blackness around me, darker than the brown of the trunk itself, darker than the ground, darker than the snow refracting light from way above. I can still see the sky. But this wave of black is deep.
I reach out and touch the soot. I bring my fingers close to my eyes and even in the darkness, I think I can see it. It is familiar, this wave of soot. The way it hugs the tree into a crest. The sharpness of the curve in the trough. I know this tree.
I step around it and my foot snaps on a twig. I look down to see one of Cole’s manufactured friends. And as I bend to reach for it, the snow comes tumbling again. I can feel myself being pulled under, the bubbles rushing away from me, and the light is getting further and further away and I am boring into the water droplets looking for something to hold on to or some kind of answer.
This is a snippet from the novel I am working on for NaNoWriMo. I hope you enjoy it. I’m documenting my journey each day.
Here’s yesterday’s stats:
Progress:
Day 5 Word Count: 420
Total Word Count: 7107
Where I Planned to Be: 8000
1667 words per day: 8335
Yesterday was supposed to be a day of rest, but an idea came to me and I needed to get it down. Yay for momentum!
How is everyone else doing?
This is something that I often struggle with, and today is no exception.
NaNoWriMo forces me to wrestle with this in especially poignant ways.
I’ll give my progress first, so you can see the dilemma:
Progress:
Day 4 Word Count: 1516
Total Word Count: 6684
Where I Planned to Be: 8000
1667 words per day: 6668
My plan for this month was to write 2000 words per day on writing days so that I could take time to spend with my family on Fridays and also have Thanksgiving off.
Right now, I am on track for the official NaNoWriMo count, which counts 1667 words per day (4 days x 1667 = 6668), but you have to write all 30 days without fail. I have met myself and I know I need some breaks, hence the 2000 per day.
Today is Friday. I had planned to take today off. I am a mere 1316 words away from being right on target. I know I can easily reach that word count today if I skip the pizza prep and just show up for dinner. But then, I will not have taken the day off.
It is tempting to get on target. I could catch up in an hour or two, probably.
But like I said, I know I need breaks. Things need to rattle around in my head so that they can come out the way I want them to. And I know that when I don’t take breaks, the muse or writer’s block or anxiety or whatever you want to call it forces me to. I will have major FOMO as my kid and husband hang out together. I’ll resent NaNoWriMo and writing in general, and the block will snowball.
So, I am trying to stay on top of it. I am giving myself a pizza and movie night, even though I am not on track, so that tomorrow, I am refreshed and can go at it hard.
Tomorrow is Double Down Day in the Heart Breathings Word Sprints Facebook Group (highly recommend), and my small group of friends is meeting to write, and my local NaNo group is meeting for a virtual write-in, so my plan is to jump on a little bit of each of those and catch up.
My goal is to write 3316 words tomorrow. Tonight, I get pizza and wine!
How do you decide when to let yourself rest and when to push yourself? Do you have any tips to make the most of resting?
It’s a new moon today. A time for listening within. A time for setting intentions. It has been making me think a lot about my whys. Why do NaNoWriMo? Why write? What exactly am I hoping to accomplish?
As the days get shorter and my energy wanes, it seems a herculean task to expect myself to write more than I do at any other time of year. Especially as the to-dos pile up with the holidays and the end of the year.
And yet…
I still do NaNoWriMo. Even after losing the first six times, like a glutton for pain and disappointment, I still wanted to do it. Why?
I have heard people give a lot of reasons about why they do NaNo.
We all have very different reasons for coming to the page, and NaNoWriMo is no exception. For me personally, it is about building my consistency as a writer. I have been writing stories since I could write, and yet it has never been consistent. My writing always seemed best when it was bursting out of me, and I just had to wait for that to come. I could sit down and vomit up something in 15 minutes that would be beautiful or sit down and work for hours on something that was crap. I felt like my writing, my muse, my creativity was not something I could control myself.
But I am working on developing a different relationship with my writing. I am learning to create the space for the writing to come, to allow it even in the quiet times, to listen for it even when I am not inspired. And NaNoWriMo helps me build that muscle. The camaraderie and the challenge and the feeling of accomplishment are awesome. But for me, the biggest gain is the exercise, the practice, the slow and steady development of my ability to sit down each day and create.
What’s your why?
Progress:
Day 3 Word Count: 1089
Total Word Count: 5169
This puts me just a little bit behind where I had hoped to be today. But also, just this much is more than I wrote in all of October, and on track according to the 1667 words everyday math. So I am happy with that, but I am going to have to put in extra work today if I want to take give myself a break on Friday!
Find someone who is affected by COVID-19 in a different way than you are. It might be someone who is taking a different approach to protecting themselves, someone who is quarantined, a local teacher, someone who had plans that have now changed.
Get their story. What is interesting or notable about the way they are handling the situation?
Use this interview as the inspiration for today’s writing. Perhaps you want to juxtapose your own experience with the interviewee’s experience. Maybe you want to take key words and phrases from the interview and use them in a poem. You could use one detail from the interview to base a story around, or something that was said as your first line.
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.
Do you have stories that have been hibernating over winter in the caves of your computer files? Poems that have sleepily spent the dark months hiding from the cold snuggled between the pages of your notebook? Blog posts or essays that are destined to fly in the summer breeze and see a new audience?
It’s time for a Submission Bonanza, and I’d love for you to join me!
Here in Alaska, the new, green life is taking shape. The air feels fertile and full of possibilities. Birds are sending their songs out into the world and all this makes me feel like I should follow suit. With the start of summer, there’s the reminder of the possibilities that exist and the importance of our art seeing the light of day, stretching in the sunshine and basking in the warmth of the outdoors.
Two years ago at this time, I began a Submission Bonanza. It was an attempt to start getting my work out in the world, which I had been terrible about doing. It had been a long time since I had submitted anything anywhere, thinking of myself as not-a-real-writer, as someone who just wrote to make myself happy. At some point, I realized that writing, for me, is actually about connection and the real reason I was not submitting my work anywhere wasn’t because it was “just for me” but because I was afraid of the rejection. I mean, this poem is my soul; how could I stomach someone saying it wasn’t good enough?
Two years and hundreds of rejections later, I am stronger. I know now how to take the rejection letters. Being an editor of a magazine myself, I see how subjective the process can be and I know that it’s not a reflection of the worth of my soul.
I also have quite a few publications under my belt, because as subjective and harrowing as the process can be, there will also be moments when your work falls into the lap of someone who gets you, someone who connects with what you are trying to say. And they’ll want to share that with other people. Which, honestly, is kind of magical.
I have to say, I’ve fallen off the wagon a bit, been remiss in keeping my work flying out into the world and, thankfully, nature has reminded me that it’s time again.
So, I’ll be doing another Submission Bonanza this year, 30 submissions in 30 days. For the whole month of June, I’ll be keeping a running list of literary journals that I submit to, and I’ll highlight some of the best ones so that you can submit to them, too.
If you’re new to submitting, check out my Guide to Creating Your Own Submission Bonanza, Choosing and Selecting Submittable Pieces, Finding Literary Magazines, and Six Tips for Perfect (Professional) Cover Letters.
Feel free to use the Submission Bonanza logo and join up. I’ll keep you posted with how things are going. Keep me posted as well!
Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest by Richard K. Nelson is a documentation of the plants and animals that frequent the forests of interior Alaska. It’s true that this book is about a place I am currently enthralled with. It’s also true that there’s a soft spot in my heart for any book about plants and wildlife. However, what makes this book really interesting is the ways in which Nelson eschews nonfiction genres to come up with something all his own.
This book could have been a narrative of his experiences living in a Koyukon village in the 1970s. It wasn’t. It doesn’t occur in chronological order and doesn’t have much of a narrative arc. Instead, the book is structured in chapters such as “The Birds” and “Ecological Patterns and Conservation Practices” with subheadings for individual species and phenomena. This sets the tone for the work feeling like a guidebook to the forest.
Instead of listing facts about animals and plants, however, Nelson draws on a multitude of sources in order to give a greater picture of how the Koyukon people view and interact with the world around them. He uses the research of anthropologists who have come before him, anecdotes from his experiences of living in the village, and excerpts from his own journal. The effects of these sources are interesting. What is structured and presented as a catalog of facts about the forest becomes a little less black-and-white. This is apropos given the nature of Koyukon beliefs and knowledge about the forest, which is up for interpretation and change based on personal experience. It is also appropriate given Nelson’s awareness of his own status as an outsider, which makes him wary of speaking for the Koyukon people. By using this variety of resources including his own experiences and journal entries, he can give his readers the same impressions that he had without putting words in other people’s mouths.
Nelson as the writer is interestingly placed in this book. For a book that uses anecdotal evidence and journal entries for much of its information, the narrator is surprisingly absent. This is because all of the personal writing and experience that Nelson uses is always about something other than himself. His journal is only used to further give information and rarely gives his own ideas or thoughts. Nelson very consciously positions himself as an outsider in the village and the culture about which he is writing, and he does a good job of keeping himself an outsider in the book that he writes.
The end result is that Make Prayers to the Raven is not an anthropological study of the Koyukon people, or a wildlife guide to the forest of Interior Alaska, or a narrative about Nelson’s experiences there. Instead, there’s a melding of these possibilities. For me as a writer, it made me think a little more broadly about the ways that I can structure and inform my nonfiction. Nelson shows that the structure, the sources used, and the position of the I do not need to all line up to one traditional standard genre. Instead, using these things in unconventional ways can allow us as writers to come to greater truths than following convention alone.
*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers. This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.