Incentive programs

So here we are, day one of NaNoW­riMo, and I’m already hav­ing moti­va­tion prob­lems. I know I need to buckle down and start writ­ing, but frankly I’m scared out of my mind. Well, tech­ni­cally, I’ve writ­ten 28 words so far today, so I have started. But the fear to really dive into it and start pound­ing out the words is daunt­ing to say the least.

So, I’m going to have to get dis­ci­plined, and fast. In the process of writ­ing this blog post, I’ve switched my blog-​writing soft­ware from Win­dows Live Writer to OneNote/​Word, researched how to use OneNote for blog­ging, switched my pri­mary web browser from Fire­fox to IE8, ver­i­fied that IE7pro will work with IE8…

It’s time to start writ­ing. Writ­ing fic­tion. Writ­ing my book.

So here’s the deal. I’ve been blog­ging every day since relaunch­ing JeffKirvin.net, haven’t missed one yet. I intend to keep that streak going, but for the month of Novem­ber I’m going to make a lit­tle deal with myself. I will still post to the blog every day, but only after I write some­thing for NaNoW­riMo. I’m not going to hold myself to spe­cific min­i­mum word count, at least not yet. Just some­thing. Even one sen­tence if I’m really blocked. As we get into the final two weeks, I might have to impose a word count min­i­mum to keep me on pace to finish.

But for now, just write. It doesn’t have to be per­fect, it doesn’t even have to be good. But I have to write some­thing before I post again.

Yikes.