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By Tgreen, November 27, 2009 12:15 am

I shouldn’t even be complaining because even though I’m 2 days off my writing schedule, I’m over 48,000 words and will hit the big 50K some time on Day 27. And, more importantly, I’m still on track to wrap the entire story by the end of the month. I really don’t want to be writing in December to finish things off like I did the last two times I won this. But even though things look good now, I paid for this. And I don’t mean the 10 bucks I donated to the organization that runs the NaNoWriMo thing. No, I paid to get to this point this week, and I’m gonna need some time to recover.

As much as I love a good holiday, especially one like Thanksgiving that’s based mostly around food and football, short weeks a work are always dangerous. We might only have 3 official work days on a week like this, but we still have a full schedule. So in that 3 days, they managed to get more than 30 hours of work out of me. This, as you can imagine, made it very hard to make up the two days I seem to have been behind for the last 2 weeks, and in fact it made it hard to not slip 3 or even 4 days back. If that had happened, I would’ve known for sure I wasn’t hitting 50K this year. I was just too worn out and sleep deprived to pull off the kind of comeback a 4-day loss would’ve required. I mean, I was so wiped out that I stood in the middle of the sidewalk on Tuesday night trying to figure out what day it was and whether or not the recycling was supposed to go out. On Wednesday night I stumbled home like Rocky in the 14th round, out on my feet and wondering what was keeping me up.

So every night, even after my one 10.5 hour day, I made sure I wrote something. I wasn’t hitting my 2,000 words, but I was still moving forward. As long as you can keep moving forward you’re doing pretty good no matter what it is you’re trying to do. This is something I learned a long time ago and it almost always holds true. This time around, the motivation that kept me moving forward was something that hit me on Monday. Because that afternoon, in the middle of some deadline chaos I wouldn’t wish on anyone, I had my aha moment.

I probably shouldn’t call it that. I believe Oprah and Allstate just went to court over that phrase. But what the aha moment is in my context here is that point where your story clicks into place and you can see everything that needs to happen to get to the end like it’s a big glowing line on the road. And so while I was banging away on whatever mind-numbing task I was being paid to do on Monday, the little piece of my brain still tending to the story suddenly figured it all out. Or figured out enough of it to make me want to say ‘aha!”. So with that in my back pocket, I couldn’t give up. I had to do whatever it took to stay close to schedule. If all had gone as planned, I would’ve hit 50K yesterday. Instead I’ll hit it tomorrow. Given the month I’ve had, I’ll take it.

So given the time left in the month, unless I get totally inspired and go hog wild this weekend, I’ll end the month at about 56,000 words. Is that enough to end the story the way my aha moment told me to? I’m really not sure. But I’m gonna work every trick I’v ever learned to try and make it happen. Because Monday? Could be another 10-hour workday. Woo hoo!

Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving. The football didn’t do me any favors, but I wrote some cool stuff tonight so I suppose I’ll be thankful for that.