Sunday, November 18, 2012

Streetcar Named Motivation (Day 17)

First off I'd like to start by saying, I'm sorry.  My blog post is a few hours late, but I was out most of the day doing nano related stuff, such as an out of towner meet up and a spur of the moment write in turned two hour chat.

Today, I want to talk about motivation.

Motivation is fickle.  Sometimes it's there, sending you scurrying for the keyboard like there's nothing else more important in the world than getting those words written.  But sometimes, as I've been finding lately, motivation is more likely to abandon you and leave you staring blankly at a screen wondering why you even bothered in the first place.

I know that some of you are going to make some comment in your head about my word count and how  it must be terrible to have so many words, but I'd just like to remind you that NaNo is, essentially, a self challenge.  Which means that 50k isn't my goal for the month.  When I say I'm behind, I'm not referring to the goal that the nano website tells you that you should be at.  I'm referring to the goal that I set out for myself, which is 300k words.

Anyway, sorry for the mini rant there.  The point is, I'm far far behind on my goal.  I'm talking about 80k. (You see, when you set your goal so high, getting behind is so much easier.  And so much worse.)

Now, my motivation tends to come from a rather specific place.  In case you were wondering, it's from competition.

Normally I can find a person or two in my region that can challenge me enough to keep me writing through out the month.  This year, though, the closes person to me is at 90k.  With a 40k gap between us, there's nothing that's driving me forward and making me want to get these books done.  Which is a problem, because I've been basing my year around the books I'm planning on writing this month.

So now I need to find someone who is close enough to me that I feel some sense of competition, while still making sure they're not already too far ahead of me that I start to wonder if there's any point.

Thus far, I haven't found anyone.  So, if you know anyone willing to throw a little motivation my way (via monthly word count challenge) please, point them in my direction.  I can promise a highly entertaining month of competitive fun.

How is your nano novel going? Do you ever have trouble with motivation?

*  *  *

Daily Word Count: Unknown
Total Word Count: 128,588 

No comments:

Post a Comment