Things are gonna change, I can feel it." These words from Beck (1993) kind of some up the last month or so for me. With all the craziness in my overstressed life, I often feel like a loser because I'm not catching up too quickly. That being said, I'm not going to throw myself in front of a bus or anything drastic like that. I'll just keep plodding along. And one day, I'll catch up.
To exemplify my losership, I attempted the NaNoWriMo challenge at the outset of the month. It started out fairly well. However, life and lots and lots of research reading and writing got in the way. I only wrote 10,911 words out of the 50,000 required. What a loser! That's only an average of 364 words per day. That's just over one page per day. What a schmuck! Right? Of course not.
Here's how I'm still a winner: If I calculate everything that I have written for my novel and my doctoral work, I estimated this morning that I'm up to about 38,000 words. If I consider everything else I have written in the course of my 1 1/2 jobs, I take it up to 49,000. If you count my blogs, FB, email, and other correspondence, any any other garbage I may have scribbled over the past month, I beat the 50,000 word count quite a while ago.
Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner Point #2: If I could have written instead have read over 1000 pages of research in the past four weeks, I believe I could have easily made my daily word count. On the two days when I actually had the time available to work on my novel, I achieved my goals quite handily.
So, you see, no soy un perdedor, Beck. I've actually accomplished quite a few impressive things this month. I've just taken to heart the advice of John Perry's article: "How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done." I might adopt this as my mantra. Not really, but it's fun to think about.
And believe me, this novel will be finished this school year. I'm going to try it again next semester when I'm only taking one class and will have a student teacher. "And my time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite, who's chokin' on the splinters."
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