New Years Resolutions Update

Last week, I said that there were two things I was going to do to stop myself procrastinating, but it is actually a third thing which I didn't mention that I have found most helpful. It's a bit like a clock-in, clock-out system. I write the date on a piece of paper, and I write the current time. Then I start my school work. When I finish that piece of school work, I write down the time again, and write down what what I did. Depending on how long the school work took to finish, I might at this point write down the time again, on the line underneath, as a starting time, and do some more work, or else I might have a break.

Like this:

On a school night, the minimum I try to do is two hours, and I generally manage it, although admittedly I have rarely done more than about ten minutes extra. But two hours a night is an improvement; I feel like I'm getting things done, and I'm not leaving work till the night before anymore and having to rush it and panic.

On the subject of New Year's Resolutions, one of my other resolutions was to finish a novel this year. The past couple of years, I have attempted NaNoWriMo (the online write-a-50,000-word-novel-in-a-month challenge, which takes place in November) and not finished my novel, but I do find NaNoWriMo a good way to write, and the stats page is very good for tracking your progress. But what I figured I needed, especially this year when I have important exams which will decide whether or not I go to uni, is more time, so I made a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel. It's not a very good spreadsheet, because I don't use Excel very often so I can't remember how to use it properly, and I don't think they taught us in school what I would need to know in order to accomplish a NaNoWriMo-style word count tracker thing and graph anyway, but I did my best.

Basically, I worked out the daily word counts that would be necessary to reach to 50,000 word goal in two months instead of one (834 words per day). Of course, you don't have the feeling of knowing that while you're typing your heart out trying to write a novel in a month, thousands of others all over the world are doing exactly the same thing, but you do have to write less each day, which is helpful.

I didn't intend to start using my spreadsheet until the summer, after my exams, but alas inspiration and imagination stopped listening to sense, and two days ago I started my novel. Another new novel. That's just what I really needed, wasn't it? Another one.

However, technically, it's not a new one. My currently unnamed novel (the document on which it is saved is titled "Just Keep Writing") is to be a rewrite of what was probably my first attempt at a novel. I remember when I was about thirteen being at my grandma's house and having the urge to write but having no paper, so my Grandma found me a little black and red notebook with squared paper that nobody had used, and said I could keep it. So I opened it to the first page and started writing. I never finished it, in fact I never got to the end of that little notebook, but looking back, it's just as well, because it was terrible.

But I loved it, and upon rediscovering it, and rediscovering some later attempts at rethinking and rewriting it which are saved on my computer, I decided that this was what I wanted to be the novel I write this year, despite having not much of an idea of where my plot is going (I have a sort-of beginning point, I have an end point, but I have no middle except the vague idea from my first draft that my characters go on some sort of journey - which is why I named the document "Just Keep Writing", because then I'll just see where it takes me, and hopefully eventually end up in the right place). This is slightly annoying, because I already had three ideas for novels (two of them rewrites) that I wanted to write this year.

So far, I have written almost two and a half thousand words (and not very much has really happened yet), and my word count for today is 2,502. Wish me luck. This may well be a long two months.