Focus and finish

Some of the buzzwords floating around the day job lately have to do with working efficiently. "Focus and finish" has to do with not getting yourself distracted. Switching between different tasks too often can make you a very unproductive worker.  Its true for us as writers, too.

Yes, you heard me. *grumble grumble*. Losing focus and being distracted is not efficient for a writer.  And yes, I'm the queen of the distraction.

What all am I distracted with at the moment?  Well, there's NaNoWriMo, where I am attempting to write 50,000 words in the middle of my longest work in progress. It's a fantasy romance, possibly an epic fantasy romance. Before my NaNo'ing, I had about 15,000 words.  Yesterday I added another 1800. Well, I made a brand new file just for NaNo and it has 1800 words.  Yay me. I chose continuing existing work rather than starting something new. Yay me, again.

Today, not so focused. I'm way off track because of cleanup work for our chapter contest. I was helping to coordinate one division and entered two others.  And after I got done checking for failed emails and forwarding judge thank-you's, I looked at my scores from the other divisions. Talk about distracting.

I entered Leap with a new beginning, my NaNoWriMo WIP Unbreakable, and my contemporary series.  Apparently I made Leap worse with its new start. Joy.  Unbreakable was a bit of a heartbreaker--once I sorted the scoregrid (they send it out with anonymous scores so you can see how you rank), I was fourth. Fourth. This, for the record, is the second contest this year where I've been 4th.  Not even a finalist, but close enough to really annoy me. I don't have my scores on Helmut and Claire's story, but I'm not quite as interested in that one.

The worst distraction is the fact that I'm signed up to read at our chapter crit group tomorrow night. And I don't have anything ready. I have this lovely beginning to a new contemporary romance all started, and I thought I would write it for NaNo, so I should easily have 10-15 pages by now. I've got 5 if I really stretch the margins and I can't get a handle on the hero.  And I've been futzing around for an hour now and managed to write about 50 new words.

So, no NaNo progress tonight, or probably tomorrow either. No NaNo cheating progress either. I'll be lucky to write the basic daily ration on Thursday and Friday, so not counting on catching up. Which means I'm like a week behind by the time week 1 is up.  Joy.

And now, back to focusing and finishing something. For now, I've got to choose 15 good pages of some writing (preferably my own) and print.