This is one of those Yogurtland visits where I set aside a moment to write a blog post update because I’m coming up on a milestone – I’m close to hitting 100k words by the end of the year. Big spoon, big goals!
Today I’m hovering at 94,550 and am annoyed I haven’t sat down more to write in 2022. You might think that’s nuts, but in my world, where two things are my purpose – writing and beadwork, real life forces itself on me way too much, taking away precious creative time.
Sometimes I envy Nenene Suriwagawa from my husband’s favorite anime, Read or Die. She’s a writer who is taken captive by a crazy despot and locked away for the sole purpose of chronicling the story of the rise of her captor’s regime and their plans to take over the world. Her fiercely independent spirit causes her to rail and spit at them at first, but when she gets unlimited supplies of pen and paper – and with no one to bother her, she quickly adapts to what would be a writer’s wet dream and finds she can’t resist the opportunity of a lifetime in doing what is asked of her.
I never do NaNoWriMo because I can’t commit to it. Too much crap gets in the way every day of my life, but give me a year with no pressure and by the Goddess, I’ll double that! Considering some people take a decade or two to put pen to paper (or fingers to a keyboard), or worse, they die with an unpublished body of work (like our good friend Charles Whitley), I think I’m doing pretty damn good.
Even though I said I don’t do well under pressure, breaking down my end-of-year goal over the next three weeks made me realize this one is quite doable. At 94,550, that’s 5,450 words to go. Divided by three weeks, that’s 1,816 words a week – which is, for me, a little under two chapters. Considering I can occasionally bang a chapter in 1-½ hours, that’s within my reach.
Well, better get to work.
