Well, I have about 10 minutes or so until I have to get in the shower and get ready for my overnight shift at work. I am not looking forward to work tonight. They really messed up my schedule this week.
They had me off Monday and Tuesday yet I have to sleep away most of Tuesday because I have to work overnight on Tuesday. Days during the rest of the week and now I don’t have another day off until next Tuesday.
It’s really a bunch of BS. Our stores bookeeper should really not be the making the schedule. She doesn’t really have the ability to make the schedule for the store. She doesn’t understand how it should run.
Now I’m sitting here trying to knock out 500+ words in about a 10 minute period.
It’s easily done. I’ve done it before.
I had a weird dream. I dreamt about a family member that I haven’t seen in about 10 years and it left me feeling very off when I woke up. I really should start keeping a notepad and pen by my bed so that I can jot things down when I wake up if it’s about my dreams.
But in regards to my dream, it really has thrown my off. I feel like I should get back in bed and try to forget all about it but I can’t. I need to get showered and ready for work. I just hope that I can push the feelings out of my head and not feel off when I’m at work.
Well, I don’t think this is going to make it to 500 words but at least it is something for the day.
Richard is asleep. I wish he was awake so that I could talk to him about my dream and he could kinda help to make me feel better before I have to go work but it’s okay. I know he’ll wake up at some point and I’m sure I’ll be able to talk to him before I get off work.
I just had to switch to my other keyboard because the space key is pretty much shot on my laptop. That’s okay. Using an external keyboard isn’t bad. It puts me at a little bit of a distance from my screen and that’s probably a good thing in regards to screen fatigue.
After switching to my external keyboard, I think I might actually be able to knock out the 500 words. They keyboard on my laptop is just so shot. Funny thing is, when I was at the store buying this one, a guy told me that I might have keyboard problems on down the line. It sucks because it requires me to go and get my wireless keyboard for my desktop and bring it into the living room to use for my laptop but at least it’s just a flip of a switch to use it as a bluetooth keyboard instead.
I definitely need to take my vitamins.
Living in an apartment, I hear dogs barking all the time. Whether it’s my own dogs or someone else’s, you can usually hear a dog barking at least every hour or so. I think I should add a dog barking scene into something I write for next month. Adding things in from every day life seems like it would be a good way for people to really relate to the thins I write.
If I can make this blog post writing related at all, it would be to leave you with this tip:
During the month of Nanowrimo, make sure to take care of yourself. Undertaking a month long writing challenge is not a small endeavor. It can be a solitary, lonely time.
Take time to recharge your creative well. Go for a walk outside. Get out and get some fresh air.
If you take vitamins, remember to take them each day. Get a routine down with those as well. Make sure that you get enough rest at night/during the day depending on when your normal sleep time is.
Keep you head up and keep moving forward, in your story and in your personal and creative life. Take care of not just your creative self but your personal self as well.
If you’re like me and like season beverages, find you a nice fall tea or coffee or even a creamer and enjoy a nice cup of tea or coffee and just think on your writing for a little bit. Take a 30 minute break in the morning to get your batteries energized and ready for the day of writing ahead of you.
I’m thinking when I get home in the morning I will work on jotting down some dialogue and scene ideas. I need to just create a single file for all the snippets of this or that, that i can use during Nanowrimo. I should also work on some prompts and idea generators to help jump start my creativity during the month in case I get blocked and can’t seem to come up with anything.
For a list of different generators, check out https://tinyurl.com/IdeaGenerators.
I’m feeling good that this blog post has surpassed the 500 word mark is almost at 1,000 words.
At the bottom of the above list, clicking on Writing Prompts brings you to a list of prompts and the first one is make you ‘bad boss’ a character in your story. I won’t lie. I have done this before. Sure it was more of the girl that I was friends with in high school who turned her back on me and made me feel like shit when I came out. I don’t think I’ve turned a bad boss into a character but lately I have been thinking about it because there is a boss at work who is always treating me and others like he is superior to use in every which way. He always thinks he knows best even when he is shown otherwise.
I totally should have left for work thirty minutes ago to be there at 10pm so I could get off at 630 but that’s okay. I’m technically not scheduled until midnight. It’s nice to have a little bit of wiggle room on my overnight shift so that if I don’t feel like going in at 10, I don’t technically have to.
I would like to get this blog post to 1,667 words. I have already passed the 500 and 1k marks and am at almost 1,100 words. If I can do this, I might redo my goals for the month and if I hit 1,667 words today, I’ll keep a daily goal of 1,667 each day for the rest of the month going forward.
Another tip I would have for #preptober and #nanowrimo as well is that if you don’t make your goal, whether it’s your daily goal or your monthly goal, don’t let it bring you down.
If you have to, readjust your word count and make up whatever it is that you may have missed. If you missed a task, reschedule it if possible but DO NOT let it get you down.
Believe me when I say, I know how stressful Nanowrimo can be. I have been doing this for I don’t even know how many years. Maybe 10 years at this point. I need to look at my Nano profile page to be sure but I know it can be hard.
Even if you have a good support system for the month, it can still be draining, both physically and emotionally.
Winning #nanowrimo is awesome and you get a bunch of fun little goodies but even if you don’t win, that’s okay too. Even if over the entirety of the month you only write 1 single sentence, it’s more than you have if you didn’t write at all.
If the 1,667 word count goal for the day seems like it will be too much to undertake all in one sitting, break it up into chunks.
You could do 10 writing sessions a day at 167 words each. It’s like when I’m at work. I have a stack of tags that are 150 tags each stack. To make the task less daunting, I take the stack of tags and I split it up into smaller stacks and as I work through each smaller stack, it helps to boost my feeling of accomplishment.
If 10 sessions a day seems like a lot as well, break it into 5 sessions and it’s only 333/334 words each session.
There are so many ways that you can take your daily goal and break it down into smaller, more easily accomplished goals to make the day not seem so daunting.
Writing sprints are a great way to get words on the page. Competing with others in a fun little word war is a good way to get some momentum going and to get the words on the page along with your fellow writers. It can also help to make you feel not so alone because you can make new friends in your shared journey to get words written.
Follow the Nanowrimo channel on Youtube!
https://www.youtube.com/user/lettersandlightvideo
They have weekly writing sprint videos during the month of November and also a couple during pretober to get you ready for Nano. They offer timed writing sprints and you can even share snippets of what you’re working on if that is something you would be interested in.
While I’m sitting here, I am watching a react video on Youtube to a video from 2015 that talked about how Nanowrimo was not a good tool for writers. I won’t go into detail about the original video itself but I will leave you with this:
Nanowrimo has given me the opportunity to come together with fellow writers. It’s given me the push and encouragement to get back into writing again. It has shown me that anything is possible if I put my mind to it. Even if I don’t win Nanowrimo, it has given me something great and that’s a feeling of being a part of something so much bigger than myself.
I really hope this blog posts may have helped you in some way. Let me know in the comments section below if it helped you. Let me know how #preptober is going for you!
Happy Prepping Everyone!!
Therapeutic Writing 
