Neal and I are getting ready for a weekend trip that will most likely curtail all painting and most writing from the time we leave until we get back.
With an eye on my daily writing goal for the month (800 words of fiction each day), I spent the last few days writing as much as possible. Working ahead so the days off wouldn’t hurt my average.
As the word count currently stands, if I don’t write another word of fiction until after 11:59 p.m., Monday, October 19, my daily fiction output will average 1,086 words per day through the first nineteen days of the month. Amazing.
That number looks good to me right now, after a day that started with discouragement, passed with intermittent packing, the normal, everyday household stuff and trying to write a few lines.
But a look forward to November shows me that 1,000 words a day isn’t near enough to meet the goal for my participation in National Novel Writing Month, which begins November 1. I’ll have to average 1,667 per day every day in order to make the 50,000 words necessary to ‘win’ the competition.
I’m also going to participate in an informal challenge with a few fellows from the ChristianWriters.com forum. That challenge involves putting in 50,000 words on any project (National Novel Writing Month requires a new work).
That’s 3,333 words a day average for the month of November.
That makes 1,086 look pretty puny!
I’ve felt for the last six weeks or so like I’m marking time and nothing more with writing. Maintaining momentum most of the time with a few days of advancing one story or another every once in a while.
But as I look at those two November challenge numbers, I’m wondering if the last six weeks and the two that remain before November arrives are really just the warm ups for the real writing. Gearing up instead of just maintaining momentum.
Maybe this trip for the weekend is coming at just the right time. Maybe it’s just the right thing to get psyched up for the double-barreled writing marathon that’s about to take place. We’ll see.
That is the question.