This is Nano month.  If you’re a writer, you probably know about National Novel Writing Month – that challenge to write 50,000 words in one month, no excuses.  If you’re a writer, you’ve probably participated or at least thought about participating.  I am no exception.

I keep a work log.  I’ve had a work log since 2000.  I mean a serious spiral notebook, write the date, keep track of how many hours I work, how many words I write, milestones on any particular day — for instance, August 19, 2007 is when I received “the” email from The Wild Rose Press that they wanted The Daddy Spell.  In that defining moment, I went from writer to author and it’s documented in my work log.

Stephen King in his book On Writing says (and I’m paraphrasing because I couldn’t find the exact quote and was almost midnight when I wrote this so I’m not going to look further):  “I write 2000 words every day.  I used to tell reporters that I took Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday off, but that’s a lie.  I write 2000 words every day.”

Wondering how I’m going to tie three completely random paragraphs into a coherent blog post?  (Yeah, me too. Snort.)

One of the reasons I started keeping a work log was because I wanted to be able to look back at my weekly/monthly/yearly achievements, to document for the IRS and my psyche that “yes, I am a working writer” and to be able to adjust my goals when I bite off more than I can chew.  Along the way, according to my log, I took classes and wrote, read books and wrote, did critiques for others and wrote, struggling to define how a professional writer worked for a living.  Do those who actually get paid to do this have as many days in their log where they recorded no work?

Then I read On Writing by Stephen King and he writes 2000 words everyday.  So there it was in black and white.  This is what I have to do to be a professional. Except I’ve failed miserably. 

Along comes NaNo.   A note  in my work log in November 2007 and 2008 shows I participated in NaNo.  That was after a couple years of mulling it over and being too chicken to try.  Ahem.  Except I failed miserably.  I wrote roughly 9000 words in November 2007 and  3000 in November 2008.  Is it any wonder I had second thoughts about signing up for NaNo this year?  Part of the problem with a November NaNo for me, I think, is that it falls at the end of the year — that time when I’m already a gagillion words short of the goals I set in January and I want to cram a million words  into the final month before Christmas.  Unrealistic expectation + pressure = failure.

When it came time to decide on NaNo this year, I looked through my work log and at the ambitious, unattained 2000 words a day ala King and decided it was time for a new game plan that would give my guilt button a rest.  Several years ago, I took Margie Lawson’s “Defeat Self-Defeating Behavior” class.  Awesome stuff in that class, so I went back and reviewed some of her techniques for achieving consistency.  And I found Do It First.  So simple, yet so powerful.  The concept is to set in your mind before you go to sleep that one thing you will commit to do first thing  when you get up in the morning.  For November, I started with a clean work slate, and began rising a tad earlier than usual, will make coffee, and then go to my desk and write.  For the purposes of Do It First, any word count is okay, but I seem to average around 1200.  I walk away from my desk after that hour and the rest of the day is guilt and frustration free because the daily word count is already finished.  For November 2009, I’ve already logged in 13,250 words, more than two NaNo’s combined.  

Am I smiling?  You bet I am.  I realized I don’t need anyone’s work ethic but my own. I don’t need BIAM, BIAW’s or NaNo. I just need to respect my own rhythm. 

So that leaves me with my work log and a new Stephen King quote to govern my writing time:  “When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “one word at a time.”  

Did you do NaNo?  Do you keep a work log?  Tell me all about it.  I’d love to hear your take on NaNo vs. Do It First.