Post-NaNo-Angst

This year's NaNoWriMo has been over for nearly two days. I reached the goal of 50k words on the 28th and had two whole days to write just for the fun of it. Or I tried to find an end for the story. The competitive side of me was gone, however. As soon as I hit 50k my drive disappeared. Since then I've only written about 1500 words. That's nothing compared to what I wrote a day before I hit 50k. 

Just a few of my many, many
postits.

I have noticed before that I work best under pressure. A deadline that someone else has set works best. Word sprints and competition against someone else is super, even though the quality isn't the best, the words are being written down. You can't edit invisible text, someone told me the other day, when I was complaining of the the poor quality of my work. The point of NaNo is to have a first draft of a novel, something to build on. 

That the characters have mutinied and totally disregarded the little I had planned to happened, is irrelevant. It can be fixed, but I have to believe in my idea. Or at least in the modified version of said idea, the one that evolved during the writing process. I need to sit down and sort through the text, put it in the right order. Still this is probably the most chronologically I've written in a NaNo thus far, which is good. I have, I don't know how many PostIt-notes with ideas, things that must be researched, characters, background stories and other stuff to go through. I need to find surnames to basically all my characters, and a few haven't even got a first name yet. 

And still I'm not sure if the text is worth all this work, because I'm pretty sure it stinks. 

While on the NaNo-subect, does anyone know of an app that's similar to NaNos wordcount thingie? I need that in my life to continue writing toward finishing a story. Let me now, 'kay?

För svenska

Finding routines

It's high time I find some writing routines now that NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. One would think I would have all the time in the world to write now that I'm home on maternity leave, but as all parents of small children knows, that's not really the case. Especially now when the husband is home with a bad back too, and has been so for the last couple of weeks. The few routines I had are long gone and we have binge watched House instead. Something that's made me want to write a hospital story, but I'm too lazy to do the needed research.

I have managed to get an hour in the morning, after I've dropped the big kids off at daycare and school and before the youngest awakes (one of the perks of not being home alone is that you don't have to wake the baby up when dropping the others off), that is just for writing. It's not always the full hour, but usually Yrla is happy after nursing and can play on her own for a while and I can continue my morning musing.

I've managed to get a lot of stuff done this way. The rest of the day is for playing with the baby, cleaning, washing up and all the other stuff that needs to be done around the house. Usually I have some time in the evening after the kids' gone to sleep too. I'm not a social as I was with the other two this time around. I don't have an "öppna förskolan" (open daycare sort of, day center where parents can go with the kids and meet other parents). We've had some play dates instead and been out walking a lot

I'm gonna continue editing and planning Nano now! See ya!

For Swedish