Still at it!

I bet you thought I had given up on this blog and forgotten all about my loyal followers.
Not a chance. I am halfway there with over 26000 words. The story is really messed up and in outline form in some places and other spots actually have conversations and make sense!
I am having a hard time with it though I must admit. I keep changing gears as I write the story. The premise is the same, but the road map to get to the end keeps changing.
That might be a good thing, I don't know, but forcing myself to sit and write is the hardest part.
So I wrote on a sticky and placed it above my screen "I am a writer; I write books".
Now when I find myself drifting and not wanting to be sitting in my chair,  I read that aloud. Does it help? I don't know, but it doesn't hurt!
I also have written the following on my notepad, and I refer to it every single day. "Do Not Multitask! and Do Not Give Up!"
Until next time,
Carol

Time for an update!

After one week of serious writing,  I found myself yesterday very angry with myself.  Feeling pretty smug about having 9457 words so far towards my goal, only to find out that yesterday, according to the NaNoWriMo daily update, I should have been at 10,000 words. Ok, so no big deal I thought. I will just go back and write some more until I have hit their goal. But then, I continued to read the rest of my email. 

I had joined the google group for the software program that I am using to write this novel, (yWriter), and discovered that I did not read the installation instructions thoroughly  and made a big mistake. 

Yep, as technologically savvy as I am, I didn't see the caveat that read,"Do NOT use Dropbox as your backup location" 

Are you kidding? I thought.  I use Dropbox for everything!!! 

I emailed the thread to see if there was anything that I could do in order to fix this other than the tedious task of copy, pasting, saving, re-installing and then pasting it all back in the correct places. So, after an hour and a half of wasted writing time, sniff, I humbly succumbed to my dried out eyes and shut the laptop down. However, you will be pleased to know, that I created a new backup and it should be fine now. 

This mistake was huge to me, because I have wasted half of the time (a year and a half), that I have allowed myself to pursue this dream before going back to the "real world". 

So, a little bit of advice here, RTFM!

Have a good one, I'm off to my room to write. 

November 1st!

It has finally arrived. November 1st, the NaNoWriMo challenge. I wont write much in today's blog because I have 1400 words to write today as a personal challenge to myself. Let's see how this works out. On your mark, get set......write!