Day 9. Yep, it’s Mid-November.

Well, okay. Maybe it isn’t mid-November. But if you are doing NaNo, then you might be able to agree with me: yes, it feels like mid-November. But I’ll talk about that more later. For now, here is my thankful list today:

1. A patient Mum. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I’m so glad she’s willing to listen to my wild explanations of what’s going on in my story at the moment, and try to offer advice!
2. Chairs. I couldn’t imagine sitting on the ground all the time.
3. Lights. I know I’d probably get more sleep if we did without them, but I am so glad that we have lights to see by!
4. Today’s verse on the calendar I made. It’s Daniel 5:5. “In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” The encouragement for today was very encouraging, too—“All authors of the Bible’s books received their inspiration from the same source, God, who even had a ‘hand’ in writing the Bible, literally. Those writing fingers belonged to The Author of Authors, God.”
5. Little Nate, who loves to pick flowers. The roses along one side of the house are all out in full bloom, and he loves picking them to take to Mum. Tonight, Seth brought him in and he had a flower as big as his face. He kept sticking it in his face to smell—so cute!
6. A friend to call on the phone. Even though we can email, it’s really special to talk over the phone, too, since we’ve only met face-to-face once (long story there!). I’m so grateful to God for such a wonderful, Godly friend.
7. Faith. I’m so glad that God gives us faith, even when our trust is waning. I don’t understand how He does it, but He does. And I’m so grateful.

Well, I think mid-November doldrums has struck. I didn’t get anything written this morning, although I did sit down to write several times. I really didn’t have any ideas as to what to write and how, and so I spent a lot of time putting off the time I’d actually have to sit down and blast it out. I know I didn’t have writer’s block, I just had writer’s not. (Yes, there is such a thing. It’s possible to not have writer’s block, but have writer’s n0t which is just NOT writing.)

So I didn’t start writing until four this afternoon or so. I had talked to Mum about it, though, and she had given me some ideas. And this morning I had done some brainstorming, so I think that helped a little. But I think the big thing was that I prayed about it. I’ve been praying all along for this novel, but I know it really helped to just sit down and ask God to give me inspiration.

The last few mornings, I’ve also followed a tip Rachelle Rea shared on Every Good Word. She said that before each write, she does a warm-up session just to get her internal writer up and going, and also reads a bit of what she wrote the day before (if not the whole thing) to get her prepped and ready to spout out another thousand words or whatever she was planning to write. (There were several other good points in that article, too—just read through it and I think you’ll find encouragement.)

I think this pre-writing has really helped. I’ve been using 420fables.com to do my warm-up, because 4 minutes, 20 seconds isn’t that long, and yet it’s long enough to write something meaningful. Then after that I re-read the last paragraph/sentence or two from the last day’s writings, and work on getting out 250 words in 10 minutes or less. I’ve been using Write or Die every single day so far, because it’s so much fun to have the time bar and the word count bar side by side and beating the time bar by minutes. :) Write or Die at $10 US was a very, very, very good investment. I highly recommend it.

To sum all that up, I was able to get my total word count up to 22,000 words today—44% of the way! So I was happy with that. :) Hopefully I’ll be able to write more tomorrow—if not, at least to work on the story in my head, read up on some history that I printed out today that will come at the end of the book, and give myself some pretty stiff pep talks so that I’ll be raring to go Monday when I sit down to write. :)

Alright. I think it’s high time I land in bed. Over all, I think today was my hardest in writing for NaNo so far. But I still managed to do it—with God’s help. I hope that the following days will go better than today did.

~Esther