[From my recently sent Municipal Liaison Regional Email]
This is the week where many of us completely crap out, having taken too many days off early in the game, thinking we’re so far behind that the end will never been in sight, and wondering why we picked this completely crap story in the first place. As Chris Baty mentions in his pep talk this week, Week Two SUCKS.
But, once you survive this week, you CAN finish, and odds are, if you push yourself through this week and keeping writing every day, you WILL finish.
It’s all a steady downhill descent to the 50k mark after you finish off this week, so push yourself harder than you did last week and get the momentum you need to survive the rest of the month. Picture yourself telling relatives at Thanksgiving that you’re about to finish a 50,000 word novel that you just started this month. Imagine how completely spectacular you’ll be feeling on December 1st, when you collapse on your couch and stick those stiff typing fingers in a bowl of popcorn and watch a mindless movie instead of writing a single thing.
You don’t get that feeling if you don’t push forward. You’ll wake up on December 1st and you’ll still have that “what if I wrote a novel?” feeling that you had before you started. Those of you who’ve finished before know the feeling, and you KNOW it’s worth pushing forward to achieve, and those of you who haven’t finished before deserve to experience it for the first time, so make THIS that year!
I have this handy little iPhone app that lets me add local users and track their word counts so that I can see how everyone’s doing. Some of you are smashing through to 50k with enviable speed, but some of you have word counts that haven’t been updated in two or three days, which tells me we’re hitting the Week Two slump, and I don’t want any of you to be defeated by Week Two.
Don’t let this week conquer you!
Now, the number of words in this message total 406 (not counting that handy signature area that Nanowrimo puts at the bottom). I want you to try TWICE that much before getting up from your computer. I don’t care if you’re not at your designated Nanowrimo computer or if you’re at the library or if your computer will self destruct in 60 minutes. Having read this message, give me the Nanowrimo version of 20 push-ups: WRITE! WRITE! WRITE!
Sincerely, sternly, and lovingly,
Brandice
(Your ever-encouraging task master of an ML)