author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So far, so good. So excellent.

We're on day 8 of November, and I have made 100% of my writing goals thus far. Morning Pages every day, freewriting every day, and sufficient daily work on the overdue Friday Fictionettes that I have indeed uploaded a pair of fictionette posts (one for the ebook, one for the audio) every third day. (If you visit my Patreon, count up the new posts, and come up short, remember that, from this point onward, they don't go live until the following first-through-fourth-Friday.)

My other goals are more like 98%. There were a couple days when I neither skated nor got to my physical therapy homework, but I definitely exercised, considering those days included Friday when I regularly handle heavy boxes of food and Saturday when I helped my roller derby league move into our new practice space.

And I've been more or less faithful to my sleep schedule goals; if I let midnight slip or snoozed a bit past 8:30, at least I wasn't up until three or in bed straight until noon. What's important is, I'm getting enough sleep and I'm getting up in time to start writing in the morning every morning. That's aided the push for dailiness tremendously.

Another thing that's helped is, I've gone back to regularly attending the co-writing sessions available to Cat Rambo's online community. The morning session is at 9:30 AM my time, and the afternoon one is at 3:00 PM. Each session comprises three 30-minute "sprints," before which attendees share what they intend to use the sprint for and after which we report on how it went. So on the days my schedule allows me to attend, I know exactly when my writing can and must happen, and for how long.

It's a schedule. I spent several months being severely allergic to schedules. I guess I'm not anymore. Brains are weird.

What I've not gone back to doing is keeping a timesheet. Turns out, tracking my hours isn't worth the inadvertent barrier to starting work that it turned into. I think about going back to it, and then I think about how nice it is to just open up the Scrivener project and dump words into it without ritual or rigmarole. How pleasant it is to just forgo all the bureaucratic rituals and throat-clearing exercises and just start.

At one time, that spreadsheet was useful to me because I needed to gather information about my writing process: what time of day is best for me to write at? How long do I go before I run out of oomph? How long does it take to produce a Friday Fictionette from a finished text? I think I have a pretty good idea of those things now, so I'm scheduling my days accordingly as much as possible. I may go back to timesheet-as-data-gathering after November, when my daily round will change significantly by, for instance, going back to my regular weekly submission procedures and hopefully making a dent in my story-revision queue. (Also attempting to post here daily. I take forever with these posts. Argh.) But for now my schedule is appropriate to my November list of Daily Required Items. Further data-gathering is not urgent at this time.

Now, shortly after I quit my day job to write full time with my husband's support, I used a spreadsheet to assuage my guilt. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't just taking a permanent vacation. I was still working, dammit! See? I put in my five hours today! Unfortunately, that had a tendency to lead to more guilt if I didn't make my five hours.

The timesheet has historically been useful, on and off through the years, in helping me end long, depressive non-writing slumps. But I'm finding that strategy less useful for that now, as the thought of setting up the daily timesheet has increased my avoidance rather than lessened it. So it's time to let the dratted thing go.

So what's working for me instead? A whole bunch of things mixed together, that's what.

There's what I think of as "imaginary external accountability," where I state my goals and intentions somewhere public, thus making myself feel obligated to live up to them so I don't disappoint the version of You, the Reader who lives in my head. Hence blog posts like this one.

Then there's actual external accountability, where I've shared my goals with my fellow writers in the aforementioned co-writing sessions, one of those goals being to regularly show up. I know they're expecting me and they might ask me how the big Patreon Catch-up Project is going. I want to be there and give them good news!

There will be, hopefully, the momentum I build up by following this schedule all through November. I'm hoping that my current routine will take on the force of habit and more or less perpetuate itself through December and beyond.

But probably the most important component is how pleased and proud I am at the end of a day where I met all my goals, checked off all my items, and am happy with the process I made. Look, if I can keep up this pace, I will be entirely caught up on the Friday Fictionette release schedule by December 17! I'm excited about that! I want to make that happen! And not being constantly behind schedule will open up so much time and energy for other stories, other projects, other goals, to which I can bring the same kind of energy and attention I've been putting toward this ficitonette-every-three-days initiative--now that I know I have that kind of energy and attention available.

And I'm just going to be happier with myself and less stressed out. Imagining that less-stressed and more optimistic version of Future Me is probably my biggest motivator to keep up this pace and meet my daily goals.

All right, maybe this is just Week One optimism. Everyone doing NaNoWriMo in the classic mode gets super-excited about their novels during Week One. But then comes the Week Two Slump. I'm hoping the non-noveling equivalent does not lie in wait for me. If I encounter a slump of my own... well, I'll reread this blog post to remind myself of reasons to be excited, that's what I'll do.

(Sometimes the Imaginary Reader on whom I'm basing my Imaginary External Accountability... is me.)