Mellie's Books

Yes, NaNoWriMo is almost over. Tomorrow is the last day. Those who have reached the 50,000 word goal will be declared winners. And there will be quite a few who will not have attained the required word count, who will be disappointed, frustrated, and wondering if they’re really cut out to be writers.

But no matter your word count, the fact that you started a book and worked on it for a month says you’ve won something. Maybe you didn’t finish as much as you’d hoped to.

But you wrote. For a month.

This could be the beginning of a habit that will see your first book published.

Everyone has different ways of staying motivated, or of making time to sit and write. I go for a walk in the afternoon, come back and stretch out, and with a glass of water in hand, I set the timer for 30 minutes.

During those thirty minutes, I write on my WIP. It may not be award winning prose, but I will have taken my project a little further down the road. If it’s a first draft, I can polish it up later. Or delete the passages I don’t like and rewrite.

But I will have made progress.

And you can, too.

If you want to give it a try, just get a cheap little timer from Amazon or Walmart–or any place you shop–put it next to where you are going to write, and choose your time.

Once that time is near, get your mind focused on your project, turn on that laptop, set your timer, and start writing. You may want to read over the last page or two of what you wrote the day before to get into the flow. But write for that half hour.

If you started NaNoWriMo with us, you are a winner. You may not get the certificate or the T-shirt, but you’ve earned my respect for having signed up and given it a go.

Besides, there’s always Camp NaNoWriMo coming up in April…

But for now, it’s time to get back to Whiskey Jug Genie!