Just so I know I’m not going easy on myself

I decided today that it’s time to start thinking about November. In my opinion, it’s perfectly reasonable. If I’m going to have a hope, a shard of hope at all, in hitting a million words in one month, then I need to start planning very early so that come November 1, I am to the point of almost knowing what every single one of those million words is, in advance. That’s not to say I’m going to cheat, I’m just going to be disgustingly well-prepared.

Anyway, I had a plan two days ago. I was going to write 2 trilogies and then a duology (or two singlets). So I open up my good old MS Word and start brainstorming for the first trilogy. (Okay, I lie. It’s going to be an expansion on and a better-formulated version of one of this past year’s Nano). As I’m writing out basic plot summaries for each of the three books, I realize that three isn’t going to wrap it up, and neither is four. So I go to add the fifth book and I think…a million divides nicely by five!

And so I am now writing a quintet for November’s Nano. It is, as of right now, called the Lost Years Saga.  I’m not sure about this whole thing, though. Last November, I wrote a number of different projects, and the same for the year before. Mind you, I didn’t switch between projects, I worked from the beginning to the end of each before moving onto the next, but there was always something new to look forward to. Not so this year. So I’m ambivalent about this idea, so far.

I’ll have to see how it pans out.

*deep breath*

Okay. So I hit 500,000 this year. It was tough and I loved every minute of it. I was working until the night of the 29th finishing it.

But I want to raise the bar (see my goals somewhere in this forum).

So next November I want to write something between 750k and a million, I’m not sure how much just yet.

This November, the middle of the month I encountered quite a bit of wrist/hand pain. I worked through it and am fine now, but I like to blame the fact that I went from 0-150mph (figuratively) when it came to writing. I wasn’t doing that much before November and then I just shot to write 15-25k a day.

Thus, I need to have started preparing for this well in advance.

Laid out is my potential plan.

July 08 – 5000 words/day
August 08 – 10000 words/day
September 08 – 15000 words/day
October 08 – 20000 words/day

The Sickness, it kills

So I first started to cough and sneeze and feel like crap on New Year’s Eve. I decided, for that reason and because it was New Year’s Eve, that I wasn’t going to do any writing.  Fair enough.

I woke up New Year’s Day. I still felt like crap. I decided, for the sake of my already-bad writing, that I was not going to write anymore that day, for fear that it would be even worse than usual.

Jan 2nd came around. I was actually feeling a bit better. But I had a dentist appointment at 7 in the morning that left the front of my mouth plus half my nose numb. You try writing like that.  So that was my excuse to not write at all during the morning. I napped away most of the afternoon. In the evening, I actually did write 4,000 words, but that was it.

So here we are on the 3rd of January, and I am 22,000 words behind.  (And I’m still not properly well, and in the past 24 hours, I’ve been asleep for 17 of them).

Damn, I hate being sick.