150 Days! Also DANGERT I forgot to post about it

You know that nagging feeling that you forgot to do something? That feeling is a way of life when you have ADHD, and its not always possible to mentally retrieve whatever the thing was in the first place. Last Tuesday, that feeling came from not posting a post, which I didn’t actually notice until I got here to post a post this week. Oops, my bad.

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            Last Sunday was a milestone though! I hit 150 days in a row of updating Brother Shadow. A bunch of those updates are in the region of 15-30 words per day, only a sentence or two, but it bloody well counts. I still showed up on all of those days.

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I think the biggest blowoff I’ve allowed myself to give this was the epicenter of my seasonal depression—two words, titling a chapter. I decided it counted under the circumstances. That kind of move has been getting the book written. I gave up on a fixed daily word count by the end of the first week—I just need to show up every day.

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I started out with no plan other than “write every day.” My downfall a lot of the time seems to be getting bogged down in the planning stage without ever actually starting a story. It turned out the opposite approach wasn’t doing me any favors either—I made it about 20,000 words in, a colossal feat for the last couple of years, and then hit a wall where I had literally no idea what happened next. I couldn’t continue. I did what I had once been so determined not to do—start from the beginning, again, but this time with about 1/3 of an outline in hand.

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The word count after that has been smaller, and the progress slower going, but the material is far more coherent, and is sticking the tone I wanted way better than the first attempt, and the pacing of the few scenes I have is a lot tighter. A chunk of my updates are things like “added 2000 words to the outline,” but again, it counts—I showed up.

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I may or may not get a draft done in a year, but if I continue to chip away at it, EVENTUALLY I will have something approximating a finished story.

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NaNo doesn’t have a badge for this since its exclusively set up for 50,000 words/1 month, but I’m acknowledging the milestone nonetheless. I’m pretty proud of my 150 day update streak.