Sunday, October 28, 2012

3K in Three Days

Ha, child's play-- writing three thousand words over the next three days. BECAUSE once NanoWrimo begins you need to write 5K every three days for a month to stay on track. Okay, let's back up. Why do I need to write 3K in three days now, when Nano doesn't start until November 1st?

I decided to flex my writing muscle in advance of Nano this year.  I'm kind of out of practice and like any skill, it's a "use it or lose it" thing with writing. So back on October 10 I set a goal of writing 500 words a day.  That got me back in a daily routine. By 10.20.2012 I had five thousand fresh words in a file. yay!  What kind of words, you wonder. No, not a bunch of curse words, nonsense, random tweets, or emails stuffed into a file. ;) This is semi-coherent writing practice.
Lama Dorjee of Dallas and me @KTC

Then I took off a few days (bad for writing routine, but good for karma) to retreat with my KTC Buddhist gang for some Bardo teachings.  Lama "DD" is one of my favorites. He calls himself the Jolly Lama because he laughs a lot. He even got off a few jokes and giggles during the Bardo (Book of the Dead) teachings!

I wrote a bit those days, mostly journaling, not part of my PreNano file.  As of today the file has 7061 words. This is where I get the 3K in three days concept. I also vowed to write at least ten thousand words in October as Nano prep. 

I'm not worried. I better be able to whip out a "K a Day" if there's any hope of writing 1667 a day every day in November. Yeah, I've heard of those people who claim to write the whole 50K in a few frenzied days, but those are rare birds. My experience is once you fall behind, it's a steep climb to write 3300 or 5,000 words in a day to catch up. It's rough writing 5K every three days for a month, but I intend to do it for my Ninth Nano cycle. GADZ! Wish me luck! BTW, this is 450 words, just for reference.

3 comments:

ZenWoman said...

This is FUN... this link, if it works, shows six years of NanoWrimo posts on this blog! Only my first three years are elsewhere. I may try to find those, too, on the old Zenara blog. Yep, I was blogging before I was nano-ing. My first blog entry was in 2001 and I started NanoWrimo in 2004.

PS - all the posts are labeled "NanoWrimo" so you can also just click on the label and get the same display. NANO... once you start you can't stop!

ej aka ZenWoman said...

LOVE IT. It's Halloween morning, aka NanoWrimo Eve, and my "pre-Nano" file has 9759 words... just 241 shy of my goal for today. I think I can cross that finish line ;) yay!

I feel GREAT having done this. Just like nano, it wasn't easy, but I wrote 1200 words this am and it wasn't that hard. So, flexing my writing muscle has worked. It was hard to sit and write 500 words two weeks ago. Now I whipped out 1200 in about 40 minutes and these are "good words" not just BS. Anyway, I feel empowered and ready to take on the day. I actually think I'm going to return to Julia Cameron's morning pages concept during November. Spit my nonsense in a notebook and then select something from that mess to explore for my daily nano quota. Now, what to call this year's effort. I'll think about that while I'm out running errands today. Ahhhh.... life is good!

ZenWoman said...

Wow, can't believe I never came back or posted the "winner, winner" lobster dinner logo. yes, I wrote 50K... 50,415 to be exact. But, now it's 12.12.12 and time to post about that! Here's to the Singularity or whatever these omens bring!