A Very Hasty Post

I'm setting myself up for a challenge. Can I finish this post before 9:00 am? That gives me seventeen minutes, which would be a record for me, painstakingly slow writer that I am.

I just wanted to post a little something here before I forgot about blogging altogether. I've been either busy or unwell lately, so something had to give, and it was blogging (as well as a number of other tasks). I don't know how much time I'll have in the foreseeable future, either, but hopefully I can find the health and time to be immensely productive so I can squeeze in some time for posting.

As many of my readers will know, today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what that is, I'm afraid you'll have to click the hyperlink to find out because I don't have the time just now to explain.

I'm participating this year, with a twist. The novel in my head is far from ready to be written (and I know all too well by now that trying to write something when it is not ready to be written produces much drivel, and I don't want to waste so much time again), so I'm not actually writing this November.

Instead, I'm trying to clock a certain number of hours spent researching, plotting, characterizing, and otherwise preparing my novel so it can get written. My goal is to have everything prepared so I can write the first draft relatively quickly (for me, the painstakingly slow writer). I would like to have the first draft done by March. It's a harsh deadline for me, but I really need to get serious about getting this story written.

So, I'd like to spend a total of sixty hours this month working on this novel. That's two hours a day. So you can see, with everything else I need to do, I'm not giving myself a whole lot of freetime.

Writing here, if I can manage it, will be a little like NaBlogPoMo, because I'll just have to whip up posts very quickly, without much editing, and not worrying about quality, if I'm to post at all. But don't expect too many posts this month, because if I'm in a crunch this will have to be one of the first things to go.

Whew, all that written and seven minutes to go! I actually have some time to proofread.

And now I post with four minutes to go! That's thirteen minutes taken to write this post, which I'm pretty sure is a record. Yay me.