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.

Day 2 - Technical Difficulties & Work-Arounds

Day 2

My Current Word Count: 7,036 words

Words Written Today:  1,569 words

Camp NANOWRIMO goal for today: 3,334 words

08:00 EST

Technical Difficulties & Work-Arounds

I am not getting up as early as I would like but I’m pretty sure this has something to do with the fact that I’m staying up too late. I put the finishing touches on my second post, added it to my combined document (something that I always create so I can easily see what my current word count is for NANOWRIMO events) and updated my word count on the Camp NANOWRIMO website shortly before midnight. I officially wrote 5,467 words yesterday but that does not take into account anything except my blog postings. 

I do not intend to write so much each day; I simply wanted to get my backstory out of the way and it took far more writing than I thought it would (not to mention far more time).

I have tentatively decided that I will create a new Blogger account (here it is!) so that I can cut and paste directly from Word into it. I hope that I can resolve the issue with WordPress—I have been overwhelmed by the response to my blog so far and I certainly love the infrastructure and community that WordPress has—but as mentioned in yesterday’s second post, I have a legitimate need to be able to cut and paste my document. And while it’s nice that I still have the ability to attach my file, who likes opening unknown attachments? I certainly don’t. I will post my new Blogger address as soon as it is ready. I will also post my previous posts there as Blogger does allow direct cutting and pasting from Word, or at least they used to!

I would also like to apologize now and in advance for not checking back with those fine folks who have liked me and/or are now following me or will choose to do so—I will get to you but it’s not too likely to be this month. I am inundated with the writing and the Spanish, which for day one at least, did not get nearly the attention it deserved. Add all of that into the mix of day-to-day normal activities I need to do along with my job search and well, things are just a little bit hectic on my end this month. Please understand; I sincerely want to read what you are writing too, for it is in reading that we gather inspiration for our own writing.

17:15 EST

Editing & Revision

I just spent the better part of the past two hours rereading, editing and otherwise fine-tuning my second blog entry from yesterday. I thought that I was pretty much done with it but that was last night when I was exhausted. Now that my writing has had time to rest as did I, it needed some work. I added a bit here and there and basically tweaked it pre-publication.

While there are plenty of things that didn’t get mentioned you will get the overall idea that I want to convey here: I have had a life-long affinity for foreign languages and for most of my life I have been stymied in my pursuit of studying them at virtually every turn. This has, as I now believe, essentially led me to a form of what Martin Seligman termed “learned helplessness,” in that I came to unconsciously believe that I never would be able to do what I wanted to do most—learn foreign languages.

After regaining my perspective from my recent loss of employment, it has become increasingly obvious to me that I have everything I need right now to learn all of the languages that I want to learn. I do not need to go back to school to do this; I do not need more money and I do not need to have a native speaker as they are already in here in the audio components of my many language programs. Should I look for native speakers to speak with? Absolutely. Is it necessary to have them present with everything else at my disposal? Absolutely not. And I am not even taking into account the mother-of-all-resources, the internet.

We are at a place and time in history unlike any before. Through the modern miracle of the internet, Google, Bing, YouTube and social media, you can locate someone at any time of the day or night who is teaching or otherwise illustrating what you want to do. All you have to do is pick your subject and find them. If you aren’t interested in my journey, create your own path; you are sure to have followers and fellow travelers along the way.