The problem with having all day to novel is having a world of distractions at your disposal. I’m following at least 100 more people on Twitter than I was last year, and since almost all of these people are doing NaNoWriMo, my feed is much more active than it is during the rest of the year. An easier question to ask when polling who’s doing NaNo is “Who’s not doing NaNoWriMo?” because almost everyone I interact with is a Wrimo. I just hit 600 followers. There is no way I can follow all of these people and get any writing done at all; if I did follow everyone, I’d spend all day on Twitter. I have no clue how people with more followers than I have do it. I tried unfollowing people last night but didn’t get very far; I only unfollowed a few business and inactive accounts.
There’s also Google Reader, which I didn’t use at all this time last year. The blogs are pared down to a reasonable amount. The problem is the job search RSS feeds. For someone who has to read an item when it shows up, seeing what is currently 486 unread job items and counting is getting worrisome. I can sift through some of them by searching for terms that I won’t qualify for at all. Think senior and executive–terms that pop up in generic feeds for the entire site but show up in descriptions in the “reports to so-and-so”. Then I can mark those as read manually and move on to the rest. This may have to wait until the weekend when things slow down (including, I hope, the NaNoWriMo website, which has seen a huge spike in new signups over the past few days). It will get done, though!
Once the forums go back up, who knows what’ll happen to the distractions. I managed it last year, though. I can manage it this year, and I wrote 19,000 words less than what I’m aiming for this year. It is possible!
2 replies on “Noveling distractions”
Speaking of distractions…For me, there’s this thing that I go to every day for several hours and they assign us work to do that night and sometimes they make us memorize stuff and then they tell our parents how we did so we have to do good otherwise our trampoline rights may be taken away.
@Pcetta This is a distraction that must be stopped. Okay, not really. But it is definitely a distraction that should be addressed.