So let me tell you about my month.
My MBA program ended November 30, and I was supposed to complete my capstone project by Halloween so I could concentrate on Nanowrimo (national novel writing month) throughout November and finally, FINALLY complete the challenge. Nanowrimo asks that participants dedicate the month of November to writing 50,000 words toward a novel. Thirty days, 50K words. You can outline the book and write character sketches and do all kinds of pre-work but the actual writing can't start until midnight of November 1st and it has to stop at 11:59 p.m. on November 30th. It's a lovely way to motivate yourself to getting through some of the very difficult blocks of writing--the actual doing it part--and I was really looking forward to participating.
Rewind to November 1st. I was 2/3rds done with my last class in the program and technically my class wasn't due until the end of the month, so although I was not finished with school, I jumped into Nanowrimo anyway. In the first weekend I wrote over 8,000 words and continued to write every day for the first week. I had 17,000 words by the first week, which is well over the minimum necessary. You just need to write an average of 1,667 words daily to make the goal, but you can write faster and skip a few days. It doesn't matter how you write so long as you make the goal by the deadline.
So I was feeling pretty confident. Then week two hit. Week two of nanowrimo is apparently like week two at the Biggest Loser Ranch. You do extremely well in the first week and then crash right into a wall the second week. My school suddenly caught up with me and it turned out to be far more work than I originally thought. I was behind, I had so much to do, I was never going to finish my class by the end of the month. So I mournfully put off Nanowrimo to concentrate on school. The second week went by and I was neck-deep in Monte Carlo simulations and supply ordering averages. I was slammed with school. I made a few halfhearted attempts to keep up with my writing and a few thousand words were added to my word count but I quickly fizzled out.
Week three was worse than week two. Nary a word was written in my novel.
Then week four was here. I was behind on school, behind on writing, and had five days left. I remember waking up on Tuesday the 26, realizing that I had accomplished nothing this month and feeling a bit angry. I had put off my reading for months to catch up with school and if I didn't accomplish what I'd set out to do this month, it would all have been a waste. I had stopped cleaning my apartment regularly and poor Josh had been struggling to pick up the slack. I had stopped going outside; I had stopped taking Scarlet for walks or drives or doing anything I normally did so that I could finish school and write my novel. And I would be darned if I was going to let this last week go to waste.
So I set a goal for myself: I would dedicate all of Tuesday to writing 10,000 words in my novel. It would still mean I was very behind, but it would help catch me up a lot faster. Then I would dedicate all of Wednesday to my capstone and finish the darn thing. Then I would have Thanksgiving weekend (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) to write the remaining 20,000 words necessary to completing my novel and winning Nanowrimo for the first time in my third attempt. It was an impossible goal. I was never going to be able to do it. But darn it, I wasn’t going to let the week go by and make me feel like a failure again.
Tuesday morning is the day I drop Scarlet off at her grandma’s and I drive to work to spend the day in the office. We got up at 5:30, we got ready and drove to Grandma’s house, I left her and drove to work and clocked in at 7:00. Work could not go by quickly enough. I was able to start my nanowrimo for a bit in the early morning but then I had meetings and work and Lindsay’s surprise baby shower, so I was unable to return to my novel until after I picked up Scarlet and drove home. Then it was crunch time. I spent a lot of time being distracted and writing at a sickeningly slow pace, but eventually I knuckled down and really wrote. By midnight that night, I had written 10,000 words that day.
The next day I was able to work from home, so Scarlet and I spent our work hours in the living room, me on my laptop and her on the floor. After I clocked out, I dove right into my capstone, writing my analysis and formatting, organizing, and laying out the statistical data associated with my project. It took me much less time than I first anticipated to finally complete my capstone project. By 6:30 that evening, I had sent off my final project and opened up my nano novel to pick up where I’d left off the night before. It was hard to concentrate on writing after spending so much of the day on technical analysis, so I gave up shortly after starting and watched television with Josh to celebrate being done with school (tentatively).
But the next day was Thanksgiving and I had 25,000 words to go. With no work on Thursday, I got up at 6:00 to try to get some significant word count in before turkey. Because I had let so much of the house chores go during the past month, Josh and I had to play catch-up on our day off, so I wasn’t able to write much. I wrote a couple thousand, we went up to Salt Lake for Thanksgiving, and we had an all-around great day. That night I tried to write a little more but I was exhausted from turkey and it was extremely hard to concentrate. By 11:30 pm. I had only written a paltry few thousand words, so I gave up and surfed the internet until midnight before going to bed.
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