I feel so restless these days. It’s mostly related to my desire to write. I seem to have all sorts of stories in my head, but I can’t seem to make myself sit down and concentrate on getting it out. I miss the days where I could just sit down and start writing without much thought. I’m supposed to be focusing on a story named Solace, and I have all sorts of bits and pieces of it in my head, but I also have a couple of other stories floating around that I feel like could have some potential. If I could just find the drive to start writing, I’m sure I could get them out, but I can’t seem to get myself to do that.

I also have some bits and pieces from the story I wrote last November for NaNoWriMo in my head. It was called Orange Sky, and I let people submit challenges, and I didn’t use all of them and I planned to write short pieces that went along with the story, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I should have done it right away. I was in the right frame of mind and setting for the story. Now I think I’d have a hard time getting back there without going back and looking into New York City travel and stuff like that because that’s where the story was set.

I don’t know. I can’t call it writer’s block since I have the stories in my head. Maybe it should be called writer’s motivation block. Hmm.

Well, I finished my story for NaNoWriMo about two hours ago. It’s an amazing feeling. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t make it before midnight, but it all seemed to come together at once. It was quite a relief. I’m also quite pleased with the outcome, and I got a standing ovation from my beta, Becca, so that helps too. Now I wonder if I’ll know what to do without having to write every single day. I would be nice if I kept up with it and wrote like that anyway, but I know I won’t. It’s just too stressful, especially with the beginning of finals starting now.

The end of NaNoWriMo is so close, and I’m so close to finishing. Yet it seems so far away. A chapter and a half shouldn’t be this hard to finish. Really. It’s ridiculous. My plan is to finish Chapter 19 before I leave for class today. Then tomorrow will be dedicated to writing Chapter 20. I want to be done by midnight tomorrow. Then I’ll have met my personal goal for the whole thing. I just hope I can focus and tie things up the way I’ve been thinking of them in my head. It always seems so much easier in my head. Then I go to write it down and it just seems to become a struggle. Oddly enough, I’ve found that writing things out by hand has helped a lot. I didn’t think it would, but maybe it’s because there are less distractions when I’m tucked away in my bedroom and I don’t think about looking up something on the internet or talking to friends.

Well, NaNoWriMo is going well. I didn’t write anything last night and I haven’t so far today, but I only have five chapters left to write. Hopefully, as soon as I clear my head a bit and gather my thoughts, I can start working on the next chapter. I might try writing it by hand again since that seemed to help me last time. Five chapters in seven days is a bit of a tall order, but I still think it’s doable, assuming I don’t slack. I’ll probably lose a bit of time on Wednesday and Thursday as usual, so it’s really about 6 days instead.

Well, I surpassed the 50,000 word mark. I didn’t even realize it at first because I was just so focused on getting through the chapters. I’ve been doing pretty well with them. I just finished Chapter 10, but considering I’ve been combining several chapters into one, it’s bringing down the total number of chapters, so I’m actually making more progress than it looks like.

I was telling one of my friends who’s doing NaNo this year as well that it’s going to be funny if I end up with a 20 chapter story because when I first started writing, I was anticipating about 28 chapters in total. I think I’m down to 24 chapters now. I’m excited because I feel like the ball is really starting to roll for the story as far as the plot goes. A lot of it was establishing characters and relationships before I could really get into the “good stuff.” I’m really anxious to write it. It’s been fun. These characters are turning out a bit different than how I expected them to be, but I like it.