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mistressofmuses) wrote2023-12-01 06:14 pm
NaNoWriMo! (and time management)
So as I'd decided back at the end of October/beginning of November, I did participate in NaNoWriMo... sort of.
While I did declare a project, I also declared my enthusiastic intent to cheat. I had so much to catch up on: I was a good six weeks behind on my habit tracking (and the journalling that goes with it; I don't post the journal part, but I do generally write up a quick summary of the day), I still have five fics from the AUgust fic challenge I signed up for, I fell behind on a lot of the things that I ordinarily try to post to Dreamwidth, like hikes or other things that we went out to do...
There was absolutely zero chance that I could catch up on all of that while also writing an additional 50k for the month. My intent was therefore to utilize all of that stuff I needed to catch up on, plus any other words I wrote via posts and comments and journal entries and such, toward my wordcount.
It was... something of a success.
I wrote more than 50k!
I have finally caught up on the habit tracking, which feels great!
I've only got one more unmade DW post (and that's just pictures of my dogs, lol), so that was also a success.
I didn't get my AUgust fics written, in part because I'm just still struggling on all five of those fics... but also because I almost always hit my wordcount on everything else I was doing, without much time to spare before I absolutely had to go to sleep.
My wordcount graph - I hit an average of a little over 1850 words per day, higher than the goal!
I'd honestly expected to hit somewhere around 1000 words per day on the other stuff - the DW posts and comments and such. So my plan was that I'd do those thousand words and then aim for the 667+ each day on my AUgust fics until they were done, and then I'd turn to the newly declared NaNo project.
First off, the newly declared NaNo project went absolutely nowhere - the handful of times I did poke at it revealed that it is absolutely not an idea that's ready to see the light of day. Too much I don't know about where I even want it to go, and not worth trying to force into anything. I'll probably scrap it for parts (repurposing the little flares of inspiration that made me interested in it for other stories with stronger foundations.) Maybe someday I'll figure out enough about it to make it worth a go, but that day was not last month, and it is not today.
The bigger realization was... well, I'm actually almost always hitting that 1800 word mark or more just in the daily stuff I poke around with on DW. That's not an astounding amount of words, and not all words are created equal, and words don't directly translate into time... but it's also not nothing. That goes at least some of the way toward explaining just how it is I feel like I lose so much time in the evenings. It consistently shocks me when "all" I've done is my regular DW stuff, yet somehow hours have passed. 1800 words is a number of words that I feel very good to get in a day when I'm working on fiction! Granted that 1800 words of mixed post and comment stuff is not the same thing, but it still gives me a bit of a different perspective on it.
I'm not completely sure yet what I want to DO with that information... It is frustrating how often I plan to write after doing everything else, only for "everything else" to take all night. If I try to write first, I don't have time for the "everything else" at all. So this does appear to be a genuine case of too much stuff, not enough time. (Or at the very least that I'm just slow!) As much as I dislike making things feel too regimented, I may have to place time limits on how long I spend on certain things, or only do certain things some days out of the week... as it is, there's just stuff that always gets put off, and never actually gets done!
I suppose I shouldn't be shocked that in the five hours I have after work each day that I can't write for two hours, mindfully watch a movie or TV show, read for an hour, comment and post on DW for two hours, play my sim game for an hour, play the video games I continue to insist are my hobby for an hour or two, take a shower, plus do my share of household chores and pet care. Yet somehow it still shocks me that the math doesn't work!
So... major digression, but yeah! NaNo was mostly a success for what I'd hoped it would be!
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It is hard to find the time for everything. Days just pass too fast.
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Days pass way too fast! And things take too much time! It feels terribly unfair.
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I definitely need to reconfigure how I go about doing things, because I really don't have a great balance on trying to give everything I want to do the right amount of attention. There are things I basically never get around to doing, and things that are always shunted into "extra time" that may or may not come around... Figuring out the right way to prioritize (and, as much as it hurts me to try and have a "variable" routine, maybe *when* to prioritize which things) is something I think I'm going to try and focus on and figure out.
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