All year I had been planning to do NaNoWriMo, the one for July, but that was cancelled due to the loss of my computer desk and sickness, then the one happening tomorrow – but I have changed my mind.
I remember that on two occasions I have participated in NaNoWriMo only to burn out by the twentieth because I felt I wasn’t as good as other writers who had already proclaimed that they have finished their novels and were now in the editing process. By the way – don’t be perturbed by this, as I eventually learned that a majority of writers, who do this, have had words in progress long before NaNoWriMo even started!
I have a handful of writer friends online who started two weeks ago on their projects and one of them even started in the second week of September!
I find writing hard these days because I am not alone anymore when writing; I have no personal private, quiet space. I have to write around my family and their noises and demands in very cramped conditions! My work, both art and writing is spread in many parts of the house, because we lack space and there isn’t much cooperation in helping me get a larger space to put everything into, just so I can work like how I used to.
I am also doing all of this with very bad health, bed bound for at least four or five months of the year, so I don’t even have the comfort of my desk at times!
I used to write thousands of words per day, for my stories, poems, songs and a huge amount of online articles that were published daily on various websites! There were times that Paul remembered me doing 12k in total in an entire day, he used to laugh and call me his future wife Barbara Cartland!
Regardless of my health, I could still produce that amount of work per day, if I did not constantly have to move around the house getting notes and using things in different locations all the while, whilst fighting to get to the places through mess and dodging fidgeters who are constantly on the move around the house!
I have copious notes for each project and used to have postcard snippets to help too, but I have no table space to see them all at once, so I have to try and look at things by hand and put them back into places all the time so they are not lost! This is difficult for another reason too, because I have a badly deformed underperforming left hand! It is amazing that I am able to type 60 to 80wpm with that disability!
Before I lived in these conditions, I had half an entire room, the size of 10ft by 15ft and an L shaped desk that took up two whole walls. I could use my swivel chair to slide from side to side and have up to twenty sheets of paper out or one hundred postcards, to constantly view whilst working, as well as having two large corkboards on the wall around me! With this, I had total privacy and control over all stimuli that surrounded me!
I could still have that here in this house, but there are two rooms that are unused purely because we have a leaking roof and rising damp in them so it is not comfortable nor safe for electrics and paper!
We simply can’t move there is no option but to stay here because the cost of the house in such conditions would mean we would need to move thirty miles or more away from this village and Paul’s family and entirely out of our county, in order to buy a property of a similar size! Henry has a three hundred year ancestry in this village, he is not eager to break it.
The roof will cost 5k to fix approximately, once it is fixed, I will gain two rooms and one of those rooms could have a C shaped desk set up that is even bigger than my previous set up. So eventually, I will have what I need again and more.
Instead of doing NaNoWriMo this year, I plan to write differently. A new way, in my tight noisy space, that will help me get less noise and more words done in a day, rather than sparse times in a month.
My new plans are to write for ninety minutes before Henry comes home from school and ninety minutes on my laptop in bed when everybody is asleep.
By doing this, I will be producing an average of three to seven thousand words per day as an average, because my average fifteen minute timer says when I have planned words I can produce up to eight hundred words and on a bad day that is unplanned five hundred words.
At the moment I am able to squeeze in twenty minutes around three times a week without hand notes, in between family quiet time or when Henry is in the bath or whatever.
Given the right environment I was very productive and proactive and very addicted to my work and was never tired nor burned out by it!
Happy reading!
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