It's harder than it looks...

It probably escaped no one's notice that it is November... the 18th to be exact. So, at this rate, I should be deep in the middle of writing my much touted and much anticipated novel for National Novel Writing Month that started exactly 18 days ago. If we were being scientific (some could argue OCD) which I am, the daily word count goal to stay on pace to complete with no more effort on any given day than another would be 1,667 words per day. Not a lofty goal when considering one of my longer blog entries can easily approach that number and they mostly just roll off the proverbial tongue. So then, the calculations for daily word count at the end of day 18 would be - 30,006. Where am I in my word count you might ask? (drum roll....) 8,242. No, not a type-o! (Perhaps I should be wondering why it is that here I sit typing a blog entry instead of more words on the manuscript, huh?) So, I have tons of rationalizations - first, I am just barely getting over whatever killer bug I caught that had me feeling under the weather for 4 weeks; second, I had house guests for 5 days where I thought I could burn the candle at both ends and entertain then write late at night and/or early in the morning which didn't happen; third, and probably most important of all, it's a lot damn harder than I thought it would be! I got waylaid in chapter 1 and got so obsessive about editing and re-editing so it would be perfect that I let parts of the story slip away from me. In fact, I skipped the second chapter almost entirely instead of continuing with the drivel and am hoping that what goes in it comes back to me at some point soon. Now I'm on vacation where I had pictured lazy warm days spent entirely on the beach with my trusty laptop and tons of inspiration to catch up on the slow start. It worked pretty well yesterday with almost 1500 new words and exciting things to write about again and so I'm trying to keep the momentum alive. My perfectionist and competitive nature is tugging at the bootstraps and keeping me in the race. Hopefully I can actually finish with something worthy of at least editing which maybe will lead to something folks might want to read. I'm beyond thinking I'm going to just upchuck a perfect first draft that will be ready for publishing which was the delusion I started out with. That only happens in fiction after all.... With all that said, I know that if this thing ever actually makes it to print I already have a group of people to acknowledge from my newly-formed writing group. You guys know who you are and I couldn't have gotten this far without every single one of you, even the non-writing members! Well, let's be honest, I probably would have gotten this far but it would have been shit without you guys!