Day #20 – Ten K Or Bust

I’m not even paying attention to my writing. I’ve got a video playing on my TV (see below) and I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop. I’m just tapping out in words what I’m actually doing, and it’s just as boring as you might imagine.

If I were starting this experiment over again, I might change the rules so that I don’t have to publish the 500 words every day. Because my guts are telling me that it might be better to only publish the good ones, the ones that may be of interest to people who aren’t me. I could write the posts and build up a backlog and then pick and choose the best posts out of the bunch to actually post? Am I overthinking this?

When I post this, I will have written over 10,000 words in the past 3 weeks. That’s a tenth of a NaNoWriMo. I’m happy about it and I want to keep building on that streak. This appears to be working for the intended purpose.

As I’m hinting at above, though, I think the next step is to… write better? Wait, hang on, is my Negative Inner Voice just trying to tear me down again? I can’t even enjoy the moment for the accomplishment it is when the Negative Inner Voice tries to make me think poorly about the output. No victory is too good not to tarnish with mental insults. Dammit. I’ve just got to keep on going.

(I typed that and then set my laptop down and watched YouTube some more… we return to this post after an hour-plus break.)

There’s a part of my personality that will do anything to sabotage me. Sometimes I give in to its destructive suggestions, like avoiding writing anything because I’m very close to a goal. Eventually, though, I can fight past it. I may fail at the 500-words-a-day challenge I set myself, but not today. Here I am typing out words, the more words the better, in order to put this duty aside for the rest of the day.

On top of my own brain telling me I can’t do the thing I’m literally in the middle of doing, I’m also hampered by reminders that I can’t see very well right now: I’m wearing my glasses, which are a very old prescription, instead of my contact lenses. I like to give my eyes a rest from contacts about once a week, although honestly I haven’t been doing that lately. My eyes are due for a rest. But in the meantime my eyesight is fuzzy, at least for reading text on a computer screen. I can see far away normally; I’m near-sighted, though.

But regardless, I’m almost done with today’s challenge. These may not be the only words I write today—I have plans that I’m keeping to myself for now—but as long as I pass 500 words in this post, after much mental struggle, I will have kept my promise to myself. I may fail, but not today.