Writer’s Brain and the Great Debate

Short Fiction - 250
Long Fiction - 1443
Poetry - 302
Total Words - 1995
Editing Hours -0
Paragraphs of Notes - 7

Here’s where that “honest about my writing, or lack thereof” comes back to bite me in the ass. As you can see, my numbers weren’t all that great last week, although I did manage to produce a brand new poem. However, you may have also noticed I skipped both blog posts on Friday.

This give and take of words pretty much sums up the rest of the week. There are things I need to add to Wandering Wizards in order to move forward with it, but I keep changing my mind about what and where to add them. I’ll write out a scene and then change it and change it and change it and then delete it. I’m starting to see the benefits of plotting things out ahead of time.

At the very least there’s one scene that needs to be added to the end of the last chapter I wrote, but every time I think I’ve nailed it I get writer’s brain. You know, where this little voice in your brain tells you that something doesn’t sound quite right, but if you make this change it would be perfect, even though it means having to go back and change a bunch of other stuff leading up to it? And the worst part about writer’s brain is, it’s usually right.

And it doesn’t help that it’s that time of year again. November is fast approaching and I’m caught up in the debate of will I won’t I do NaNoWriMo. Seriously, if you haven’t heard of National Novel Writing Month, go HERE - it’ll save me a really long-winded explanation.

I’ve been doing NaNo for many years now. I have 9 unfinished novels to prove it. Actually, make that 8 of them - Lucky Dog started out as a NaNo novel and I actually finished that one. I skipped it a couple of years ago, breaking my streak of seven years in a row, and I really missed it. And I noticed the NaNo widget to the right (that I was too lazy to remove) has reset itself, all ready for this year. I didn’t even know it could do that.

There are two things I wanted to have happen before I threw my hat into the NaNo ring. One, I wanted to have the draft of Wandering Wizards finished, and two, I wanted to be able to write at my new desk in my new office.

While I’m confident I’ll be able to write at my new desk by November 1, I know for certain I won’t have Wandering Wizards finished. If I’m going to even consider doing NaNo this year, I need to at least knock off a big chunk of it. Therefore, my goal is to do 5,000 words this week. Let’s face it, if I can’t do 5,000 in one week, there’s no way I’ll be able to manage almost 12,000 words a week (1,667 a day) during NaNo.

So let’s meet back here next week to see how I did, shall we? If this doesn’t motivate me to write, I don’t know what will!