Starting word count: 33,895

Yesterday’s word count: 1,512

Total word count: 35,407

The product: Three letters, arrived on the same day.

The process: I procrastinated a lot before writing yesterday. In Atlanta, farm-to-table gourmet burger places have become a trendy thing. A new one opened up on Monday, so the first thing I did instead of writing was go there. The second thing I did instead of writing was talk to an old college friend on Facebook. Once I finally got around to writing, it seemed silly to have procrastinated since it was, in general, pretty easy. I’d left myself a rough edge, as described by Cory Doctorow in this article on writing, which I referenced in a previous post. I knew all day that last night’s chapter was going to be in the form of letters from home, sent to my protagonist. That made it a lot easier to knock out more than 1,500 words in spite of having frittered away most of my writing time.

According to this excerpt from a TED talk by Derek Sivers, I may have brought all this procrastination on myself. I told at least three people yesterday that last night I was going to write letters in my novel. All three seemed to think that was an awesome idea. According to the studies cited in Sivers’ talk, that positive reinforcement I got ahead of time made it less likely that I would meet my goal. (Which also means all this jabbering about NaNoWriMo could be undermining my entire novel-writing attempt.)

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