After my little bit of globetrotting last week, it doesn’t surprise me that this week has been what I would term an unmitigated failure. Putting it mildly.
Okay, that may be being slightly dramatic but as I saw my numbers decline against the little graph that tells you where you should be, has been a little demoralising. Okay a lot demoralising. I started so strong!
As the goal of 50,000 words gets further and further away, the motivation meter has been depleted. I feel like I’m just writing words for the word count rather than anything that is moving my story forward in an authentic way.
I hate to use any sort of management speak because it is one of my pet peeves, but at work they use this term “The Jaws of Doom.” In the context of work it relates to the amount of money you need and the amount of money you have. As someone who works in the public sector, the amount of the money we have is getting smaller, meaning the gap between the two is opening up like The Jaws Of Doom. NaNoWriMo for me is turning into The Jaws Of Doom, the number of words I want to have and the number of words I do have.
Now this could be that my lack of planning is finally, well and truly getting to me. And also a few off days. I’ve been turning the idea I used as inspiration over in my head since the prompt I was given in my writing group, Writing With Confidence with Annika Spalding. I loved that idea (see the end of this post), I was pleasantly surprised with what I had accomplished in such a short time. The possibilities of that paragraph, to me, were endless. I feel like I have boxed in my own idea. A pine box that would do better in the ground than ever seeing the light of day.
Don’t get me wrong, there are moments of joy and I am quite impressed with myself but it is starting to feel like a chore. Like ironing. Wow, I hate ironing. To be fair, as this is my first NaNoWriMo, it could be that at this point, even with a story I was madly in love with, I would feel like the daily writing on this one project was a chore and it was a race to the 50,000 words.
I don’t know, I’m just not in a good place as I write this, although I did take my laptop to work today and wrote through my lunch break to up my word count. One thousand, three hundred and thirty-five words in an hour. Which isn’t bad at all. I think I hit a sweet spot, a bit of the story that I really liked so the words just flowed and I wanted to escape some office s**t for a little bit so I escaped into my story. It’s the first time all week I’ve felt that spark for the story again but I’m not hopeful it will carry on. And it’s not been enough to lift my mood.
I think a little part of me is starting to hate my story. I don’t want to admit it but the love and the joy isn’t quite there. I hope it comes back before the end of the month and that after all this, there is something to salvage for the future.
But I will write try my best to write everyday until the end, less than 10 days to go. I’m sure I can write a little everyday. My new personal goal is to try to get over 40,000 words and if by some miracle I get over 50k, I will take back every bit of negativity in this post!
xx woeful writes xx
Check out my other NaNo posts –
Woeful Writes 