Camp NaNo continues on, and I continue to write. And, mostly, to have a good time with it!

Somehow week 2 is always the hill I have to get over. I’ve written before about my week 2 struggles, and this month basically remained true to that. My word counts this past week weren’t as high as week 1—although they remained higher than the bare minimum. It doesn’t feel like I’ve slowed down, but the numbers don’t lie.

Like the previous week, I budgeted my words for one day off and still managed to stay ahead. What I forgot to take into account were the plans I’d made with friends that took up an entire day. Instead of one planned day off, I ended up taking two days, one planned and one unplanned, off. As of yesterday, I’m officially behind on my word count. On the other hand, because I was a bit ahead, I don’t need to write an astronomical number of words to make up the difference, and I expect that I’ll be able to do that and once again get head so that I can still find one day this week to give my brain a rest.

Right now the balance of writing and not writing feels almost as important to me as the actual writing. On the one hand, I want to participate in this fun event and I want to finish this manuscript. On the other hand, I love my husband and I love spending time with him. I don’t want to give up one for the other—that wouldn’t be fair to either of us. Finding those ways to meet my goals and not give up all my social or family time has been an ongoing challenge, but I also think I might be getting better at it: writing during my lunch time so that all my time at home isn’t taken up trying to meet my goal, and taking time not to write have definitely made me a happier writer.

Speaking of writing during lunch: that continues to be one of my best ideas. I don’t always manage it, and sometimes I don’t bother at all (my writing group meets Thursday evenings, so I usually wait and do all my writing at the meet up) but when I do, I’m always glad that I did. There are writers out there who make time to write in the tiny cracks during their days: in the few minutes between when they wake up and when the kids wake up, during the commute (hopefully on public transportation, but I suppose a driver could also be using a voice-to-text or otherwise recording themselves speaking), while their kids are at various lessons, etc. But I’ve tried that, and I find it difficult to get back into the headspace when I don’t have a lot of time. That 30 minute lunch break is probably the shortest possible time that is really useful to me.

• Weekly Word Count: 10,929/11,298
• Current Word Count: 10,929/25,000
• Manuscript Total: 48,181/80,000

(Small note: I realized the other day that my manuscript total isn’t a wholly accurate number. There are sections that I’ve counted as words written that I’ve then crossed out so I could rewrite the scene. In fact, I’ll be doing that today during my lunch break because the last thing I wrote didn’t quite work. If I had to guess, I’d say there are somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 words that probably shouldn’t be counted in that total—and certainly not more than 3,000—but since I count the words as written, I won’t get a more accurate total word count until I start typing this beast up.)

I expect this coming week to be somewhat difficult. In the next day or two I should enter a section the details of which I’m somewhat fuzzy on. I know where my characters need to end up, but connecting what I’ve already written to that next part is likely to give me a little trouble. This is the part of the story I basically skipped over in the last draft, so the next chunk will be completely new to the story. I might take the time to do some brainstorming, but I might also just write with some vague ideas and see where the story leads me.

And so we go ever onward!