So I teamed up with Sean this year to tackle National Novel Writing Month again. While Sean hit his 50k words (way to go, Sean!), I did not. I hit 30k, which is definitely better than I did in 2011, but it was still far short of the goal.
For your entertainment, here’s a list of things that I did in November while I should have been writing:
- Being better caught-up on emails, podcasts, Twitter, and minutiae at work than ever
- Catching up on recording memorable quotes from audiobooks I read in October
- Listening to three new audiobooks
- Hitting the ‘Backspace’ key
- Reading roughly ten online articles a day
- Creating two spoof twitter accounts (teaching myself – poorly – FauxtoShop in the process)
- Staring at my progress chart on NaNoWriMo.org for minutes on end
- Catching up on clothing donations and Old Navy online returns
- Watching the first 20 minutes of Wyatt Cenak’s ‘Brooklyn‘ stand-up special
- Re-potting our houseplants, rescuing herbs from the garden, and planting more basil
- Preparing for and kicking off a completely new D&D campaign (at least 20 hours of writing gone right there)
- Completing my character graveyard
- Outlining
- Gluing together various broken wooden and ceramic things around the house
- Updating my Battle.net launcher and Blizzard games and playing five rounds of Hearthstone
- Reactivating my World of Warcraft account and reading up on best Professions to choose for my Blood Death Knight. (If you’re interested, I think I’ll just stick with the gathering professions until I max. Which will, of course, never happen.)
- Building half of a waterfall elevator on my Minecraft server
- Sleeping
- Getting depressed about not writing more
- Going through my document and correcting spelling errors, brainstorming character names, and replacing all of my placeholder tags with names
- Writing this list
So… those are some pitfalls to look out for next year.
