We’re a week into National Novel Writing Month, and I’m feeling… frustrated but optimistic.

I was away at a work-related seminar for three days this week, and I hoped to spend some of my boring evenings in the hotel writing. Unfortunately, my work laptop has built-in encryption and cloud integration, meaning I couldn’t connect my flash drive with all my writing docs without encrypting it.

An encrypted computer is obviously never a bad thing, but I didn’t want to risk having my personal files uploaded automatically to my work’s cloud network — otherwise known as the convenience of digital technology.

I could have written in my journal, but I had been so excited to continue building on one chapter — that wasn’t in my journal — that I became disheartened.

The point is, I didn’t get any writing done. Thankfully, I wrote about 2,000 words over the first few days of NaNo, so I have some work to build on.

But with a 20,000-word goal, I’ll need to do some catching up. We have a nice weekend at home coming up, so I like my chances at this point. In any case, I’ve already written more in November than in September and October combined.

Week 1 NaNo Tip

So take this as a lesson. It’s only week 1. Even if you’re not as far along as you had wanted to be, you have time to catch up. Use the weekend to do so and build some steam going into the second full week.

How are you progressing this NaNo?

Steve D