Camp NaNoWriMo – Day 19 of 20 (in the end)

So this great plan of mine to be at my desk by 9am and write for 4 hours was foiled before I even got there. The poet was working from home and he had a Skype meeting (or a Team meeting) at 8am. For 4 hours. (FOUR hours!)

I fannied around for a bit, doing what chores I could, making us both breakfast and cups of tea until I felt the urge to just get my earphones (earbuds), find some rain music, and just type.

I found a website that specialises in relaxing sounds and white noise for study, but as soon as I started to play the first one, my firewall alerted me to the fact that I was being tracked. So I switched to stealth, played it again, and this time the firewall didn’t pop up.

The problem then was, with the rain playing loudly in my ears and with the meeting going on across the desk (I could still hear it in the background), I kept on making typing errors. Because I couldn’t hear the keys.

So off I pootled to collect my Qwertick (download it from your favourite download site) so that I could hear the typewriter keys in my ear and the carriage return noise every time I hit Enter. That was much better.

I set my timers for the first hour, and off I went, typing solidly. Against my entire daily target of 3,587 words, for my first session, I managed 2,268 words. Not bad, eh?

I took a full 10-minute Pomodoro (I’ve been hitting continue while I’ve been in the middle of something, but this morning I took the 10-minute break), and then it was back to the typeface.

I didn’t type quite as much during my second session, I think I was starting to tire. But I wrote an additional 1,799 words, bringing my total for today to 4,067.

That now leaves me with 3,106 words to write tomorrow. If tomorrow goes as well as today, I should do it. What a shame I didn’t break through the 40,000-word mark.

The poet had another meeting booked in for 1:30pm, slap in the middle of dinner time, so we had dinner at our desks and then I tried not to make any noise while the dog barked and the cat mewed and a train went past and …

As I already finished this week’s revisions yesterday, after dinner I continued with this week’s main client work. This one’s a good one, quite well-written, and I’m getting through it quite quickly.

All being well, I’ll finish it tomorrow afternoon rather than tomorrow evening, and if he approves my wages before midnight on Friday, it will automatically be paid into my account next Wednesday. If he approves it Saturday morning, I have to go and manually collect my wages on Thursday.

All together now, One day more … 🎵