Hours and Hurdles?

For years I've set myself to work 2 hrs a day. I don't always make it--"life" intervenes, or inspiration hits and I'll go 3 or more hours...
So far this year the 2-hours-day has worked. However, yesterday I got bogged down. Music at Starbuck's over-loud, ddistracted, couldn't get my earphones right, kept changing play lists, revised my synopsis, kept checking my word count. To my own disgust, I added in a slew of backstory i knew well and didn't progress my current plot... Nonetheless, I struggled on and barely made my word count.

I think internal distractions are the worst enemy--at least for me.

Camarec - Fantasy is the only truth.

I am also limiting myself to ~2 hours of strictly writing, although if we count the amount of time I spent doing ML-y kinds of things, etc., it's probably closer to an average of 3 hours a day (practically none on some days, more on others). I also have an Actual Day Job over the hill in Mountain View (about an hour commute each way for me), and at home I've got a husband and 2 kids who like to know that I still like them.

In November, I live by lists. Every time I think of something I need to do, at home or at work, I write it down. Because I just don't trust myself to remember anything but what words I want to write next. And I carry my home laptop around with me everywhere. I squeeze writing in during lunch, while I'm waiting for stuff, etc. I set my laptop up in the kitchen when I get home so that while I'm cooking dinner, if I have some time between "everything's in the pot" and "time to dish up," I dash off a few more words.

Here's my one hurdle: I don't get nearly enough sleep and I tend to eat badly. It's easy to sit at your desk during lunch and, if you eat anything at all, have it be something from the vending machine (she says in the second person, distancing herself from her own bad habits). So I have to distance myself from The Author in another way - I become my own mother. I do insist that our home life follow the same routine - laundry get done, meals cooked and eaten, rooms cleaned. And I just turn some of that "mother" energy on myself. I feed myself vegetables even when it'd be easier to have a granola bar and keep typing. I put myself to bed at a reasonable hour because although no one is yelling at me if I don't come to bed, someone will certainly yell if I don't show up to work.

In all the hubub, don't forget to take care of yourself!

Junglemonkey
Santa Cruz Co-ML
Nanowrimo Winner '03, '04, '05, '06, '07, '08
Future Winner 2009
Wearer of the Eyebrow Dots of Power

My hurdle has been and no doubt will be again, the mid-month slump. Just as the book is really starting to gel, just as things are going my way, I find myself fussing with formatting or compulsively fretting over a new character's name or just wandering the nanowrimo forums looking for something, but I don't know what. My dedicated hours a day float away on little clouds of strangely unnoticeable (at the time) procrastination. It's after the novelty (pun intended) has worn off, but the excitement of being close to the goal has not yet arrived. Beware the Sargasso Sea of mid-month!

What I do is simply spend more time per day for that rough 5-7 days to crank out the same number of words. There's probably a better solution, but i don't know it.

deborah

"Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?"

Hi, amaterathu.

Amusing handle--is that amaterasu with a lisp, or is it Thu as in Sauron's name, or what?

I took about 4 hours to write 2300 words today, but that included a couple games of Backgammon with the computer and a time out to boil some spaghetti. I suppose 3 hours a day would be enough to keep up. Since I decided to throw out the (minimal) prep work I did in October and just start with a vague premise, I find a lot of what I'm doing is what I call 'hard slogging'--trying to figure out what's going to happen next, slowly forcing every word. When I get stuck, I invent a new character and have him or her do something for a while, which usually goes fairly quickly at first. But I feel the story is still pretty static at this point.
Last year I had a bare plot outline, and a better idea of where I was going, but I still ended up in a fairly intense state of dislike for the story, because (if I remember correctly) I felt it wasn't living up to my intentions when I outlined the plot.

hi!
so, i am wondering if i am the only one who isn't clocking hours?
i have no idea how many hours per day i've been writing, but i'm pretty sure i only did about ten minutes today, and it was dang fun!
i've always wanted to write a book but never had the discipline to sit down and do it. i had to lure myself into it in order to Begin. and that's what nanowrimo is for me - seductive cute randy impetus. and by disguising it as a 'fun' break from life to get to be creative and write, it's working...i'm writing!
i'm enjoying the unfolding of my story. i did zero prepwork. no ideas, no synopsis, no outline. no character profiles. in fact, i have no idea what i'm doing. and i could care less if it's 'good.' (it probably isn't...?)
but the point is that i'm having fun finally writing! i'm doing it! yay! and after this, whether a book is birthed or not, i am going to write more regularly.
thank you for being a community doing this together. this is rad.
now back to my story....

ps - in grad school all of my best papers were written last minute. i wrote my thesis in 7 days...125 pages...32,000 words. but that was really over-the-top stressful! i think i could benefit from your model of designating 2 hours per day to keep me on track. (as long as it can still be fun.) thanks! :)

I think about writing the same way I think about exercising. My goal is to do it for some period of time every day. On the other hand, if I don't get all my time in, or if I miss a day, I don't feel too awfully bad about it.

I'm really glad you're having a good time. I'm always willing to extend the write-ins if we can get a group of people who are willing. I know that when I was living in San Jose, there were seven or eight of us who met every Sunday, all year long, to do writing. One of those regulars is a former ML for San Francisco, two are now MLs for Silicon Valley, etc. I think that being around other writers is the best thing in the world!

Junglemonkey
Santa Cruz Co-ML
Nanowrimo Winner '03, '04, '05, '06, '07, '08
Future Winner 2009
Wearer of the Eyebrow Dots of Power

Amaterathu is a derivative of Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess. In Mamaru Nagano's "Five Star Stories" there was an androgenous emperor characer (a man that looked more like a woman) named Amaterasu, although the only time he wrote the name using Roman letters he spelled it Amaterathu. My guess is it sounded more gothy and gender neutral that way. At the time it seemed to fit me, and I have been using it ever since the early 1990's as a handle because I don't have the imagination enough to come up with a better replacement.

I totally buy you as an emperor. In a low-key way. Although you're not that androgynous. :-)

Junglemonkey
Santa Cruz Co-ML
Nanowrimo Winner '03, '04, '05, '06, '07, '08
Future Winner 2009
Wearer of the Eyebrow Dots of Power