Day 13: as slow as molasses

This weekend I'd intended to play NaNoWriMo catch-up, envisioning a daily goal of several thousand words a day to bring myself past the 20,000-word mark today. My best laid plans for this weekend, however, were in no way connected to reality.

One of the downsides of teaching a double courseload at several different institutions--necessary moonlighting since my full-time adjunct job doesn't provide health insurance or enough salary for me to save to retire someday--is the sheer exhaustion of coming home from one job only to begin another. On Friday, I had to catch up with grading for my online classes; on Saturday, I had plans to go walking followed by dinner and movie with a friend. (The hours I'd intended to spend on the So-Called Novel on Saturday morning were spent instead fixing a technical goof whereby with one errant mouse-click, I'd replaced one of my "live" online classes with an archived version of a past course: ooops!) On Sunday, I had more online grading as well as an appointment to meet a friend...so that's the story of how I wrote less than my minimum 1,667 words per day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, finding myself so sleep-deprived from last week's teaching and grading catch-up that I couldn't stomach the thought of staying up late or getting up early to write.

Today I've made better progress, already having written a couple thousand words amongst the usual grading and hoping to write more tonight before bed. But now that another busy teaching week is about to begin, I realize I'll probably fall even further behind this week, with the week of Thanksgiving, when I'll be driving home with dog and laptop to spend time with my family, being my next and biggest chance to play Serious NaNo Catch-Up.

So, progress has been as slow as molasses...but that's simply a matter of scheduling. The writing itself, when I find the time and energy for it, is moving at a tolerable pace: the prose itself is clunky and "first draft-y," but I have confidence the overarching story with its various fits and starts can and will clean up nicely when I have time (after November) to go back and revise.

In the meantime, I find myself envying folks with 9-to-5 jobs: folks whose full-time jobs provide insurance and pensions and thus don't have to arrive home from one job only to start another. One bit of advice for any unpublished writer is "Don't quit your day-job," to which I'd reply, "Which one?"

Word count: 13,362
Where & when: sitting on my bed, in several segments between grading
Last line: But like Christ, I only fell three times, and from there I dusted myself off to walk on.