Well, yesterday on my day off I learned that I make far, far more progress if I write on my novel for an hour at a time instead of fifteen minutes. Funny how that works!
I later did another hour, and later wrote two reviews, and the word count really spiked. Then it dawned on me: With 15 days left in November, I have 8 of them off and am working on 7 of them. I made a spreadsheet, and if I do an hour on my working days, and at least two hours on my off days, I really might still be able to hit 50,000 words.
Yes, I still want to catch up on my reviews. I still want to get moved in to this townhouse. But yesterday I did get some pictures up and I did get some reviews written.
A lot is going to depend on how these headaches go. The day before yesterday, I didn’t do any writing at all because my head hurt and I couldn’t think clearly. But yesterday, I told myself to wait to take a nap until I had done an hour of writing. I actually found that writing for an hour was a better treatment than a nap, because writing is more distracting! And you can only nap so long. There comes a point where no matter how sick and weak you feel, you won’t be able to go to sleep any more — and you’re left with lying in bed feeling sick and weak. How much nicer to distract myself with writing. Though to be fair, I think that the nap was what I needed to have the strength for the second writing session of the day.
And actually, I’m finding that writing a review with a headache is a little harder. With the novel, I’m writing a first draft, and first drafts are supposed to be bad. But with the reviews, I very much would like to be coherent and thoughtful, and that’s a bit harder to do with a headache than writing a bad first draft.
So, my progress so far, at past the halfway point:
On my novel: 11, 158 words
On my novel plus my blogs: 17, 512 words.
Still a long way to go! But it’s still just possible….