Week Three

The third week began in even more of a crunch than the last. I made plans with a friend who has a difficult schedule to get together for dinner on Monday night. I knew we'd have fun, and that seeing a fresh face might be good for novel writing, though I was a little worried about how much this was going to impede my progress. Over the weekend, I realized I was super behind on reading my book club book. The meeting was on Thursday of week 3 and I usually try to start reading the book on Monday of the week before (week 2 of NoWriMo, in this case). As you might recall from last week, I was reading the Babysitters Club rather than Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuiminated at the beginning of Week 2. I started working on Illuminated at the Saturday that was the beginning of Week 3, 5 days before the book club session. On Sunday, I remembered I needed to renew the book at the library because it was due 2 days later. I logged in to the library website and discovered that there were outstanding requests and renewals were not permitted. YIKES!

So, I spent Sunday evening and as much time as I could muster on Monday and Tuesday reading Illuminated so I could get as much of it read as possible before returning it to the library.

I kept reading on Wednesday and was able to get the book completed before our discussion meeting on Thursday evening while only incurring a $.30 fine at the library. Phew! I was proud of myself when it was over, though then I had to confront the ugly truth:

I was days behind on my writing.

By the time I woke up on Saturday morning, I was still trying to complete the words that were supposed to be done on Wednesday. I spent pretty much the whole day on Saturday writing. Chris Baty (who wrote No Plot, No Problem) recommends a system for getting 6,000 words done in a day, which involves spending three discrete chunks writing - one after each meal - and taking deliberate breaks to do some other activity in between. I had plans lined up on Saturday evening, so I knew I wouldn't be able to implement his system. And, in all honesty, I didn't want to: I was tired of writing!

So, I tried to compromise:

Yes, this is me writing while watching old episodes of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. I enjoyed myself, though I didn't do all that well on my writing. I got through the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday words, which was good. Unfortunately, I had nearly all of Saturday's words, and Sunday's words to do on Sunday. But, I had plans to be out of the house for almost the entire day on Sunday, so I assumed I would fall behind once again.