NaNoWriMo Day 4

Word Count: 7,300
Proposed NaNo Count: 6,668

As you can see, I was a bit more successful today. Really, part of it IS just about sitting down and making myself do it. If you never sit your butt down and open that program and begin, then you never get anywhere. I've been really slack at my writing lately and so I have to start being a bit more disciplined (in more ways than one). Once I sat down and started writing, it wasn't that hard to get out. It helped that today my two MCs actually met, and Sasha (FMC) is starting to get an inkling of just how bad things really are.

I actually felt like I could have kept going tonight. I think I could've gotten to 8k. But I made myself stop. I don't want to burn out this early, and I feel like part of that is regulating myself so that I'm writing a bit each day, not a word vomit every couple of days. That's not the kind of writer I want to be. I ended up doing about 2.4k tonight, which is just about right for me. Tomorrow, I think I'll aim for the NaNo daily word count for around 1,700 (I have a thing for rounded numbers), which should leave me right around 9k.

And I think I did burn myself out a little, that first day. Writing nothing and then jumping right into it... Well, it's not easy. You really have to ease yourself into it. It's kind of like exercising. You can't just start off running twenty laps around the gym. Maybe you could do ten laps, but then you're staggering and you end up not being able to move for a week. It's better to pace yourself, to work yourself up to it. Something around 1.5k is just right for me (although for someone else, it may only be 500 words, which is perfectly alright outside of NaNo). It's a habit I'm hoping to form that will take me past November, to continue after NaNo. Like blogging!

New Look

As will be evident by anyone who has ever been to my blog before, it has an entirely new look. Today I spent a few hours looking through Blogger templates until I found a few I liked, and then I experimented to see which one I ultimately liked the best. It ended up being this, which allowed me to customize a few features (such as the main title).

There's a couple of different reasons for this. One, my original template was done by one of my very talented friends, Sadey. But I couldn't edit anything on my own. I don't know a lot about HTML and although I've tried to learn on occasion, it generally gives me a headache. That means that anything I needed changed, I generally had to wait for Sadey to be able to do it. And I think that gets pretty frustrating for both people pretty quickly. I can't fully customize this one, but at least it's more easily changed - when I get tired of it, I can go and find a new one.

Two, the old template was no longer relevant. One of the books featured in the header was on hold indefinitely, and the other one I'm not currently working on. It was a beautiful template and I have the code saved so that if I ever want to go back to it, I can. And I just might someday. But right now, I felt like having something different and this is what I came up with. I know some people look down on premade templets, but I don't care. I think it does exmplify me in a lot of ways.