“We are strong.
No one can tell us we’re wrong.”
–Pat Benatar, “Love is a Battlefield”

Miles Last Week: 58
Total Miles: 2362

If you know what NaNoWriMo is, you probably follow a writing-centered Twitter account.

If you don’t, I will tell you that it is a buzzy abbreviation that stands for “National Novel Writing Month.” November is the month that a lot of writers decide to crank out a fifty-thousand-word novel in just thirty days while dudes are growing mustaches.

If that sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. (The writing part, not the mustache part. Of course, I have no idea what goes in to growing a mustache, so I may be totally wrong about that.)

A few fellow writers at work have decided to undertake the NaNoWriMo challenge, and I am, too…sort of…only insomuch as I’ll be writing fifty thousand words and working on my novel.

My plan for this month is to use this time to really figure out how to fix the novel I started while still in college, work through them, and go about starting to make those changes. (And then completely finishing it and all that jazz. Some of that will probably have to happen after November 30, though.)

Basically, fifty thousand words worth of work will be happening, but my novel probably won’t be fifty thousand words longer. It’s confusing, but it makes sense to me, and that’s all that matters, right?

 

Since my novel work has pretty much been in limbo since I graduated from college almost two years ago, I’m using NaNoWriMo to give me the kick in the pants that I need to get back on track. This may or may not be considered cheating at actual NaNoWriMo, so I sometimes tend to think of it as NaNoWorkMo–which really should be every month, I suppose–but sometimes you have to make up your own rules that don’t really apply to anyone else and no one else cares about, anyway.

My two big goals for NaNoWork(Wri)Mo are:

1.) Crank out a significant number of words every day.

One of my goals for this year was to write every day. It hasn’t been happening so much. Better late than never, right? That’s sort of how a lot of things in my life have gone.

Fifty thousand words in a month averages to 1,667 per day, which is approximately seven pages. Yes, that does seem like a lot. Quite frankly, so does nine miles of jogging/elliptical-ing a day, but I’ve managed to make that part of my routine.

2.) Stop overthinking and just do it.

May I speak frankly? Sometimes the pressure of trying to write something worth reading gives me so much anxiety that it gets in the way of my productivity. However, I also can’t not try to write. It’s frustrating, and I’m not proud of the nerves, but that’s the situation.

Part of the unofficial point of NaNoWriMo’s high word count is that you don’t really have time to think about it. You just do it with the full understanding that some of it isn’t going to be so great. You get the story out and fix it later. It’s what you have to do.

That’s what I have to train myself to do.

And after nine days of NaNoWorkMo, I think I’ve discovered something–the big bad secret of NaNoWriMo.

Fifty thousand words in a month is surprisingly not as impossible as you think.

You’d be amazed at how many words you can crank out during your lunch hour or in the half hour before going to bed. It’s completely doable when you take it a little at a time and don’t freak out about the big picture.

Honestly, before starting the Mile Project, I would probably doubt my ability to train myself to do anything. Now, though, I know that working every day–especially when you stumble sometimes–is way more important than doing everything absolutely correctly all the time.

Wait. I think I’ve had some professors who tried to teach me that. It sounds vaguely familiar. Hmm. Weird.

Gosh. It’s almost like exercising has had a ripple effect in the rest of my life and my self-discipline. What the heck, man?