In which I hit my word count goal for the year early!

I was in an online write-in for NaNoWriMo last night and we’d just finished a sprint and I went to update my word count and I noticed something. My spreadsheet looked weird. But then I realized why… the little cells that are red when I’m behind on my word count were all green.

101,877 words (and that’s before I’ve done my NaNo words for the day)

Holy carp! I hit my word count goal for the year. Almost two months early! I actually hit it on the 5th and didn’t notice it until the next day because it’s been so wild around here, I’m not operating at optimal levels of brain power.

Now, my inner voice hastens to add, it was a greatly reduced goal than what I usually set and I’m still committed to having to write at least 50,000 words by the end of this month so the writing year is far from over. I’m certainly not writing anywhere near as much as I used to be and I still don’t really feel like I’m getting anything done. That said, when I post my graph for the last few weeks, you’ll see that I have gotten MUCH better about getting writing in and I hope that trend will continue.

The unfortunate part is that I have only been able to get writing in by staying up later and sacrificing my already small amount of sleep and by never doing anything other than work because leisure time is for sissies but I hope that will be able to change in the future if the little one starts to sleep more. (Naps are still a rare and elusive beast, though she’s taking a decent one right now*, bless her little cuddly face, but she’s been teething for so long I haven’t had more than 5 hours of sleep at night and never continuous in at least 2 months so I am just Always. So. Freaking. Tired.) BUT she is adorable and grows more wonderful and lovable every single day so, really, it’s a fair trade.

*=Needless to say, she woke up exactly 2 minutes after I wrote that sentence.

But I digress. While I felt like I was a Grade A Moron for trying to do NaNoWriMo and be an ML with all this chaos going on, I am weirdly very glad I am doing it though I feel a bit like I am burning the candle not only on both ends but with another wick in the middle as well. It’s been fun to start a new story (I owe you a blog post on this new word in progress at a later date) but also good to force myself to work a crazy amount just to kind of remind me that I can do it. It’s weirdly inspiring to realize just how much you can get done when you just become zen about not sleeping. It’s also helping me to work more efficiently and to prioritize my life better.

The quest to write 50,000 words in a month, it should be noted, is really the least of what is taking up my time. I write hella fast and the 1,667 words I owe Chris Baty a day are less than half an hour of work for me. It’s all the ML event scheduling, email answering, forum wrangling, nonsense troubleshooting stuff that really eats up my time. My inbox is out of control and over 90% of it is NaNoWriMo stuff at any given moment which is really impressive when you remember that I also run a freaking online business.

(I’m rambling, I know. This is what happens when I write a post by stopping and starting again hours later and then hours later again.)

ANYWAY, the point I was trying to make was that, crazy life and small word count goal considered, I was really rather proud of myself for hitting that benchmark already. If I successfully get my NaNoWriMo 50k in, I’ll finish the year with one and a half times my original goal and end up with a final count just a few words shy of the very first year long goal I set for myself back when I first started this. Smaller goal or not, the fact that I’ve gotten as much done as I have with all the madness going on over here is really kind of awesome and I’m going to go ahead and take a deep breath and let me by proud of myself for a minute.

Ahh.

OK, I’m done. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I still have another 40,000 word to write before December…