NaNoWriMo Week 2

Hi all,

It’s been a busy week of writing and frustrations about writing and technology. I have wondered if technology would intervene in my attempt to get to 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Although I have had no computer mal-functions so far, trying to solve problems with my email (Bravenet) have taken time away from writing.

My email has probably been doing the worse thing it could possibly do: telling me it has sent messages when they haven’t been. I was debating edits to an article I had written for Divine, and suddenly he stopped receiving my emails. He ended up ringing me to find out if I still wanted the article published. I did.

I have contacted Bravenet to see if they care enough to actually fix the problem. They took months to fix a previous problem where my word attachments were being turned into a mess of symbols at the receiver’s end. Needless to say, once I have time, I will be moving my website and email hosting somewhere else.

New Article on DiVine.  

I have a new article up on DiVine today and it is about weight loss. It is particularly aimed at people with disabilities. One thing I knew, which was reaffirmed by my research, was that many weight loss programs have a physical exercise element. Physical exercise can be very difficult for people with certain disabilities. I found a very interesting site in Sparkpeople which is a bit like a Facebook for people who want to lose weight. It has groups for people with disabilities and groups for chair exercises. Because DiVine is a Victorian Government site, I had to severely reduce references I wanted to make to Sparkpeople.

NaNoWriMo.

My goal for the second week of NaNoWriMo was to write more words on each day of the week than I did for the previous week.

Day eight: I spent a while discussing (at least I thought) edits on the DiVine article so I did not get to writing to 2pm. I still managed to write 1788 words which was a fraction over the previous Tuesday’s total. I had written 14416 words in total.

Day nine: I was very angry when I started writing; not the greatest frame of mind to write in. I did some research and found a suitable point in space for the story to be set in. I finished chapter six and then wrote up a lot of notes. The novel’s plot is looking very good. I wrote 1740 words for a total of 16156.

Day ten: More quick research, this time on the brain and what parts of it do. There were no interruptions as I was blissfully unaware that my email wasn’t working. I wrote 1771 words for a total of 17927.

Day eleven: I felt like crap all day, with a sore back of the head, sore hands, even a splinter – which I removed – in the tip of a finger. If I was going to concede defeat on writing my daily quota, this would have been the day. Instead, I wrote until I finished chapter nine. With lots of small chapters, this novel is different from the other two I have written. I wrote 2100 words to scrape over the 20,000 words.

Day twelve: I was distracted by finding my email wasn’t working. Again I didn’t start writing until after 2pm. But I still made the quota and I still bettered last Saturday’s word count. I wrote 1839 words for a total of 21866.

Day thirteen: And I failed to better last Sunday’s word count. I finished chapter eleven and thought that would be a good place to stop for the day. I figured out I am writing at about 500 words an hour, but I am not going back past the current sentence I am writing to edit. I also spend about half an hour a day sorting my notes out. And many hours thinking about the novel. I wrote 2059 words for the day and a total of 23925.

Day fourteen: Again I was distracted by my stupid email. I am fed up with Bravenet and I sent them an email telling them so. I would not recommend Bravenet to anyone, their customer support is probably the worst I have encountered – and I have dealt with Amazon to get a Kindle replaced. I managed to settle the mind and do some writing. I wrote 1879 words and passed the halfway mark for a total of 25804 words. 

I only missed bettering the previous week’s daily word counts on one day. I am now 2471 words ahead of schedule.