Time?!?

Barely ahead in my NaNo novel again.  Today I had the entire day off of school, and I was looking forward to getting an entire day of writing done, but instead I went to Tucson and didn't get anything done there that really needed to get done.  But I did spend time with family, and nothing, ultimately, is more important than that...  I got in my required writing anyway, and I'm sitting at just over 6k novel words and 6k 'other' words, which might just explain why I'm so tired and why I'm getting kind of sick of sitting down and depressing key after key after key and staring at black words in a glaringly white background.  Man, I have stuff to do.  I have people to email, my phone broke somehow yesterday and I need to get a new one or fix this one somehow, I have people that haven't heard from me in weeks and probably think I'm dead or worse, I'm constantly tired no matter how much sleep I get, I really need to see a doctor because my fingernails are pretty much falling off of my fingers, and that's all more information than you all really need. 

Anyway.  Writing a novel is much less fun under stress.  This feels, honestly, like work.  I have fun writing 10k words a week, I enjoy it, I make time some way or another, but my goal of 50k this month is hard.  I have so much homework and papers and tests this month too...  November is a really bad month for students.  I have a short story due that I haven't even started, I have other projects that I haven't had a chance to even think about, I have a novel that needs to be edited, and I totally meant to stop all of this needless bitching when I started a new paragraph.  I'm sorry.  This blog is supposed to be more than a place for me to just rant and tell the internet how my life sucks and blah blah stuff you don't care about.  But what else do you want me to say?  My readership tanked last week when I didn't update for a few days, so I don't even really know how many people are reading this.  Probably not many.  Want me to tell you how I'm writing my novel anyway?  How I'm still at goal, even though I have all this shit going on in real life?  Okay.  That sounds good, and maybe even a little more like a normal blog post.

Write it.  Write it, write it, write it.  I made a pretty big mistake when I decided to burn the ship and ruin any chance of further mystery, but I went with it, wrote it anyway.  I knew something would come of it.  Either a good idea, a good emotion, a good bridge, something to work with.  And I found what really needed to happen, to add that missing intrigue and future developments, but I found a couple of things when I was writing it the first time.  Just write it!  Even if the plot doesn't work and you know you're going to go back and scrap it, write it.  But I guess that's my advice for a lot of things.  To be perfectly honest with you, I don't know where I'm fitting these words in.  I got home from Tucson at ten thirty, I had my 1700 words for today by 11:45.  I just wrote them and I don't even really remember what they were.  They probably weren't good words, but gol'dang it they're written and just waiting for me to go back and realize how I can write them better.  I don't really agree with the whole NaNoWriMo conviction that quantity matters more than quality, and I suppose I would really rather write thirty thousand good words than 50k crappy ones, but I'm stuck, now.  I made this commitment, and maybe after this month is over I'll take some time to reevaluate this whole 10k words a week thing.  What I need more right now is to edit what I am writing, start rewriting my first two novels and start planning out the next ones, the second in the trilogy and the second in the series respectively, start a healthy weekly plan to get myself published and keep cranking out novels, but maybe at not such a fast pace as I'm trying to right now.  I need to convince myself that right now I just don't have the time.  Not with a full schedule of classes.  Not with this job, with the hours I'm working.  Maybe later, absolutely later, when I'm both graduated and unemployed, but not now.

Sorry that this post turned into, well, a rant, and maybe it's not the fact that I didn't update last week that drove away some of my readers...  Maybe it's me.  I'll try harder to give you some more pertinent information, more posts about writing and less about my personal life.  Maybe tomorrow I'll finally have the time and focus to write the post I've been waiting to write since the inception of the blog, and what one reader (my Dad) has already commented about - what's the deal with the whole 'proof of theft' thing, anyway?  Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you're all having a great night.  Happy Veteran's Day, and for all you actual vets out there, thanks for serving.