Hi everyone!

It’s been a great week in the MFA. I workshopped a piece of mine on Wednesday, and I’m thinking it’s got real potential. It’s a short nonfiction piece I’m calling “Prolonged Exposure,” and I’m excited to keep working on it.

We also had a visit from National Book Award winner Tess Gunty. She gave a reading in the Cabell Library, and afterward, she joined the MFA for drinks at the Get Tight Lounge. (bc the MFA loves to get tight.)

There, Tess Gunty attempted to buy a drink, and she got carded. It’s not everyday that you see a National Book Award winner get carded. That’s what I came to the MFA for.

I’ve still been working hard at the sequel to Mosquito Wings, and I’ve been enjoying the process so much. The plot is becoming more and more clear to me as I write. I’m getting excited to write certain big story beats. The word count is difficult. To write 50k words in a month, you must average 1667 words per day.

Many of my days, especially in the early part of the challenge, were below this quota. But I had a few enormous days, and the total quota never got too far away from me. November 12th, I caught up. Here’s a screenshot of my progress.

The columns represent my word counts on each day of the challenge. The dotted line is where I need to be to stay on pace to get 50k by the end of November. As you can see, I was way behind on the 7th, but on the 8th, I wrote about 3600 words and got myself close to the goal.

I don’t care if I get 50k words this month. I don’t care about hitting the same word count every day. What matters to me much more is that I sat down with the project and did SOMETHING every day. A 500 word day means as much as a 3500 word day. It’s all about building the habit of sitting down–and about HAVING FUN.

So that’s my attitude here. Writing every day of November is much more important to me that the number of words that I write. And I’m grateful to this challenge for giving me an extra little bit of encouragement to work. I really do feel that NaNoWriMo has breathed a bit of life into my routine.

The last thing I’ll share is a secret that has helped me keep up with the challenge. Most days, I do two writing sessions per day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon or evening. For both sessions, I light a candle, turn on my writing lamp, start a fifteen minute timer, and read. When that timer is up, I start an hour and fifteen minute timer, play a game of solitaire, and then write.

On my biggest days, that’s a bit less than two and a half hours of writing. It’s much, much easier for me to break up my writing into two sessions, rather than to just try to do two and a half hours all in one go. Some people don’t feel that way–it takes some writers an hour just to get going. But I prefer to break the sessions early and just do more of them.

I did this a lot over the summer when I was revising Mosquito Wings to prepare for submission to editors. Except then, because it was summer and I had no other occupation, I would do two sessions of about two hours.

I like the two sessions. It’s extra frequency, which means it’s twice as habit-forming. You also take the pressure off each session when you know that you’re going to do another one later on. I can feel like crap writing my first session of the day, call it quits after fifteen minutes, and I still might have a good day of writing if the second session is productive. Or if I have a great morning session, I sit down for the afternoon session knowing that it really doesn’t matter how much I write. When the pressure is off, it feels easier.

If you’ve never tried two-a-days, I’d say give it a shot. They don’t have to be an hour. You could do two 20-minute sessions to start with, and slowly increase the time as you get comfortable with the routine. I prefer to write on a timer rather than writing to a word count, because I know that I won’t be shackled to the desk if I’m having a slow day. Give it a try. Short sessions are more approachable. Doing sessions regularly makes it easier to be regular.

I’ve written too much here. I need to save my energy for the afternoon session!

Bye bye.