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The 106 Hours of NaNoWriMo, Day 4

Every Monday morning, I arrive at work at 7 am, and I know I have 106 hours of work week ahead of me, assuming Friday doesn’t flame into some sort of apocalyptic disaster.

In those 106 hours, I have to get all my work done, plus some extra so that my organization can thrive, or at least so I give it my best shot to thrive.

I also have to eat a few times, sleep a few times, play with my dogs as much as humanly possible, keep the family fires burning … and write.

One hundred and six hours is an eternity, and it’s a blink of an eye.

When it comes to NaNoWriMo, 106 hours is a miracle, because I know I have to not just write during those hours, I have to write about 8000 words if I want to keep on a 50,000-word-per-month pace.

And, really, since weekends are something of a crap shoot when it comes to writing, I’m not safe at anything less than about 11,000 words cranked out during my 106 hours.

If you like math, that’s 2200 words per day, which is going to require something like two hours — again, per day — of writing.

(You probably write faster than that, and so do I when I’m “on,” but 1100 per hour is pretty achievable.)

So, all I have to do is find those two hours, and it’s not that tough to do most work days.

Get up early enough and you can have a nice, leisurely breakfast and coffee while you bang out a dozen hundred words.

Take your laptop and find a corner or coffee shop to spend your lunch hour typing away.

Forgo those two Seinfeld reruns and write your own something about nothing (hopefully not really nothing).

If worse comes to worse, stay up an hour late and worry about your eye bags in December, once your novel is done.

For me, here on Day 4 of NaNoWriMo 2019, breakfast and TV hour got the job done … I managed about 2500 words today.

Published inNaNoWriMo 2019Writing

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