Week 3 of National Novel Writing Month should feel like I’m closer to the end, but there’s still two weeks left! This week, I returned back to my normal routine but life kept throwing curveballs in between my creative writing sessions.

Here’s what I have been up to this week on My Nanowrimo journey.

I have a traveling update! At the beginning of this week, I booked my flight and my hotel for my post-National Novel Writing Month trip. I won’t say where I’m going, but I’ll give a hint: It’s much warmer than my current temperate zone.

What will I do on my trip? Probably not Write. And definitely will try not to work—at least not most of the time. I plan to relax away from the screen of my computer and in the sunshine.

I also purchased my 2018 NaNoWriMo winner shirt. True, I haven’t won this writing challenge just yet. Please note the key word: yet. I will win this. Even if squeezes me out like a sponge.

I normally don’t like to purchase my shirt until I reached my 50K mark. However, I am confident that I will make it to 50,000 words, if not surpass it.

But enough about my spending habits. Let’s talk about the habits I’ve made for writing this month!

My Progress

To stay on track with reaching 50K by November 30, it was a daily goal of mine to write at least 1,667 words. And fortunately, I cranked out more words than that every day!

Since last week, I am over my goal of 32,100 words. In fact, I reached 32,751. Most days, I wrote at least 1,700 words, which is slightly lower than my average last week. So now my NaNoWriMo profile writing meter predict that I will finish by November 28.

While I’m bummed that my projected finish date has been extended, I am relieved that I am still on track to complete this in November.

My Obstacles

This week, I returned back to the Home Sweet Home of my cubicle. How I had missed my second monitor and my workspace!

However, the reunion was to be short-lived. Because many people plan to be out for the holiday this upcoming week, I had many back-to-back meetings on top of pressing deadlines on big projects. So if I wasn’t in a conference room, I was cranking out work at my desk.

Needless to say, I was working 10-hour days.

The extra hours I needed at work crept into my usual writing time. And this week, I resumed my running schedule, so I had even less time to complete my daily writing assignment for NaNoWriMo.

My Successes

Something had to give in my schedule. After shelving my running shoes last week, running couldn’t be cut. And coffee can only take me so far, so I definitely needed my sleep. What was I to do?

I decided to cut into my relax-and-unwind time.

Normally, I spend my evenings after dinner relaxing for an hour or two before I turn off the lights and go to sleep. But I could only reach half of my wordcount goal in the morning between my morning run and morning commute to work. So I would make sure my dinner break didn’t run over 30 minutes before I flipped open my laptop and typed away more words to reach my goal.

While I prefer to write in the morning and not at the end of the day, I found that I crafted some creative scenes even after the chaos of my day. My creativity, strange enough, thrives when I am at my most fatigued (probably because I am not alert enough to censor out my thoughts). Now I know that I have the capacity to write at different times of the day if my schedule should be hectic in the future.

My Goal

I plan to continue hitting a minimum daily word count of 1,667 words with a goal of reaching at least 44,420 words by this time next week.

Can I make it happen? Stay tuned!