Day 3 - The Plan is Evolving

OKAY FOLKS, I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND I HAVE BAD NEWS. WHICH ONE IS WHICH WILL DEPEND UPON YOUR PERSPECTIVE.

Day 3 

My Current Word Count: 9,546 words

Words Written Today:  2,510 words

Camp NANOWRIMO goal for today: 5,001 words

First of all, after only three days it has become abundantly clear to me that my plan, as originally imagined, was far too much work for me to accomplish in the allotted time. There is a reason that NANOWRIMO is designed to be an “edit free zone,” as it were. Trying to write an average of sixteen hundred sixty-seven words per day and polishing it enough for publication while teaching myself Spanish and looking for a job apparently is a bit much for me. Writing that much, without having to edit it at all is a piece of cake for me by this point. I’m used to it. I’ve done it repeatedly and I love the challenge; it’s the editing that’s killing me.

I started a second post yesterday but it wasn’t coming out the way I planned. I got up and walked away, knowing as most of us creative types do that taking a break allows a fresh perspective the next time around. I came back to it this morning and I worked on it some more. Things were going great. And then I started to edit the whole thing again. I got stuck. I took a break. I came back to it again. I got frustrated. I looked at the time and it was around ten o’clock and I hadn’t had my first Spanish lesson of the day yet. I left my writing and I started working on my Spanish.

Much of this story could also be applied to yesterday and the day before that too, with some slight variations thrown in. Basically it comes down to priorities and I have three real priorities that I need to work on this month and they are:

1)      Look for a job. For obvious reasons, this is, and needs to remain, my first priority. I do job searches and I get e-mail alerts from a number of job search engines every day but I have additional things to do besides that and all of these other activities are taking far too much time away from this, my most important priority.

2)      Teach myself Spanish. I want to become fluent in multiple languages and Spanish is one of them. Moreover, being able to say with confidence that I can speak, read and write Spanish will only enhance my employment opportunities.

3)      Finally, I want to be able to say, as I have for each of the past seven times I have entered either a National Novel Writing Month or a Camp NANOWRIMO, that I wrote at least fifty thousand words in a single month and I have the proof (thanks to the word count validator atwww.campnanowrimo.org and of course the other one at www.nanowrimo.org ).

My initial goal for this month was to post all of my fifty thousand words on my blog at WordPresshttp://languagelearningandlife.wordpress.com/ and now also at Bloggerhttp://languagelearningandlife.blogspot.com/. So I could show everyone my progress. But, and newbie WRIMO’s take note here especially—editing during NANOWRIMO takes far too much effort and detracts too much from the task of writing. That’s why these tasks are traditionally done separately, at least by successful writers. Successful writers know that stopping to evaluate what you are writing while you are still writing it is a recipe for disaster. I knew this already but I really thought that I could get away with it. Maybe If I wasn’t looking for a job or maybe if I wasn’t teaching myself Spanish this month at the same time things would be different. I am fairly confident in my writing ability at this point, enough to say that I could effectively write and edit this much in a month as long as I didn’t have too much other pressing business to attend to also. But I do.

So what I’m really trying to say here is that I will still be posting on my blogs, I just won’t be posting as much. (That’s the good news/bad news part that it took me seven hundred words to get around to saying.)

The really good news is that I should be able to make my posts far more focused than I could when I was striving to write so much each day. I will be selecting topics related to what I am doing and writing those for sharing on my blogs. I hope you stick around because things will get better now that I’ve decided to winnow out more of the chaff. I also believe that, once everything settles down into more of a routine, this will become easier and I will thus become more effective.