 the morning is the 22nd of November which means it is the last four week of Manorama and I am significantly behind. I've got about 14,000 words just because last week was a complete wash. Like I did about 800 words on Saturday and that was it. So I'm not aiming to get the remaining 36,000 words done this week but what I thought would be a better focus for this week is finding a routine that's sustainable while I'm in this job because obviously I'd like to keep writing beyond Manorama. So and I need to figure out a way to do that with this job. So it is 6 30 a.m. and I think I've been up since 2 like I woke up and thought oh I really hope it's not almost time to get up I really feel like any more sleep checked my phone was 2 a.m. like great I've got another few hours before I need to get up and then I just didn't properly get back to sleep I've been dozing since then. I wish then there's like some way you know you could get a message which says actually Jackie you're not gonna get back to sleep you might as well get up now but I didn't. So now I'm up and I'm gonna try getting some writing done before work. So I'm not actually sure what changes I'm gonna be making to my routine yet to make writing more sustainable this week's a bit of an experiment. The one change I have decided on is that Monday is no longer a gym day so originally Monday and Thursday we're gonna be the mornings I went to the gym because they're the days I work for a home so I thought it would be easier to take a bit more time if I need because I just have to come home afterwards rather than having to like get dressed and go to the office and what's interesting is the two Manorama weeks where I've had my normal office routine I actually haven't gone to the gym on a Monday I've done it on Tuesday instead so that shows maybe there isn't that much merit in saving the at-home days for the gym from a writing perspective though I think it's important to you know start things the way you intend to finish them so if I want to have a good week of writing it would be good to start the week with writing so time to get started. So I wrote for about an hour and did 917 words I think which brings me to 15,649 words obviously still much lower than I should be today I really wasn't happy with what I wrote and I think it's the first time in this project where like there have been days where it's like I think it can be better but overall I've been like pretty satisfied even if I've wondered like how I feel reading back through it in the future today I really did not like what I wrote I just wrote something to have written something I might end up cutting it completely when I finished work today but at least I wrote something I guess but now though I need to start work for the day. I've finished work I've showered now I'm gonna have something to eat and then I want to do some brainstorming about the book because I was really not happy with what I wrote this morning and I could do better. I'm wondering if it's gonna turn into a heist book because we could have a heist to steal a gondola which they need to use to get out of Venice but my last book turned into a heist book so I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Good morning it's Tuesday a bit after 6 a.m. and I'm heading to the gym and I think we're gonna have a heist so I've been thinking about this obviously not all night because I slept but I went to sleep with the words gondola heist in my mind and like just gondola heist we're gonna have a heist to steal a gondola that's kind of cool but now I'm just gonna figure out how to do it justice but also do it in less than two chapters because this is not the point of the book. Seeing myself in the viewfinder look at those dark circles this is why I should film before I shower and wash off my makeup for the day so I'm not a very good blogger this Nana Rhymo I went to the gym I went to work now it's almost 8 p.m. you've missed my entire day not that there was that much to show so at the gym I did actually use my rest breaks for the first 20 minutes to do some notes for my story so I popped um I copied the text into a word counter tool online and it was like 213 words or something so that counts and this evening I've been trying to edit the video from last week the problem is because I was trying to film with my new phone the file sizes are so large that like I've been waiting over an hour for them to copy across to my computer so I can edit them so that's a little annoying but yeah it's more of the usual work was busy now I'm tired and yeah what's some what's funny with work is I've basically been told I'm getting promoted so that'll ultimately be CMO the company I work for likes to make you deputy chief before they make you chief but what's interesting is this round of promotions I have like 14 members who I need to promote in my team so I've got a level of managers rather than everyone reporting to me and already like my boss is saying you know that's not enough you need like another layer of managers between you and them because it's already like as you grow in the team it's already too many people reporting to you so it's quite funny we've been planning like the org chart for Q1 of next year and I feel like I'm building an empire I never intended to work in marketing never thought I'd be a CMO but this is what we have problem is I'm not writing very much so I did do some brainstorming this morning I am going to do the gondola heist or a mini gondola heist like a one-chapter heist but I'm realizing that now that it's winter and it's quite dark after work I think if I head straight home from the office in the evenings I'm just not going to be motivated to do anything like it's cold and dark I just want to snuggle up in a blanket with a book so what I might try doing tomorrow if I finish work early enough is going to a cafe before I go home problem with cafes at the moment is that they close at seven I don't actually know if that's just at the moment because of COVID or cafes always close at seven in Switzerland so maybe it's a normal thing here but cafes close at seven and often I don't finish work until six or six thirty so that's not a lot of time for writing but if I managed to get out at like five thirty I think I could get a good session in so maybe I'll try that tomorrow for now though I'm going to see how my videos have gone with processing so hopefully I can get this log up sometime in the century hello and happy Saturday so I have realized that if I'm doing a writing vlog I should just only film on the weekend because that's the only time when I do any writing so it is what 1 p.m. on Saturday the 27th of November which means there are four days left to go of Nana Rhymo I have how many words do I have 15,862 words out of 50,000 so there's about 35,000 to go assuming I write every day between now and the end of the month the Nana Rhymo website says I need 8,535 days in order to hit my goal this is not going to happen partly because that's not going to happen anyway I'm working on Monday and Tuesday but also because I think I mentioned in one of my earlier clips this week I have some freelance work to do so my old business has hired a new editor and I'm reviewing her first edit before it goes back to the client and I am wishing I had never agreed to this not even just for Nana Rhymo but because like it's like I moved on from this business I sold it for a reason I didn't want to be stuck in there I wanted to be focused on writing and as I'm going through this like I enjoyed doing the earlier training calls with them because we do like trial edits on past client books so they can learn some skills without putting an actual book at risk but now that I'm looking at a real book like I'm just going through it going I really don't care I can see that there are things wrong with this but I don't have the mental capacity it's also just lazy unless I can't be bothered to figure out how to fix it so I'm leaving feedback around things that could have been done better and things just got to keep an eye out for next time but in the past when I did this so when I was running the business and I do this for my new editors I would like re-edit a book if I had to in the weekend before it was due and now I'm like if I can see a simple change that needs to be made or make it but I'm not pulling the book apart and putting it back together which is what I would have done in the past so I think after this I'm just going to have to go to the managing editor and say look I'm happy to help with the trials but at this stage I just yeah I don't want to be doing it anymore anyway the book is 170 pages I am up to page 43 and it's not that it's a bad book it's like about traveling through Australia with your dog because we did like nonfiction how to books so it's not a bad book it's just like it's more like a giant list to call so she's listing out all of these different locations she likes and activities to do and so on and so forth which means even though the content is not bad it's just not the most engaging like it's you don't really build up any momentum as you go through it because it's just like item one item two rather than a narrative that pulls you in so I've already done like an hour and a half on this and I'm what is that a third of the quarter of the way through so I think I'll aim to get through half of it today just because I would like to do some writing because I need to do 8 and a half thousand words today in order to catch up which again is not going to happen but I would like to do something so I've got what another 40 or so pages to get through before I can take a break from this book so it is now 24 so I've been working on this book for two and a half hours which was longer than I expected it takes a surprising amount of time to just copy and paste things into the same order from chapter to chapter so I did get to the halfway point and I did organize the rest of the chapters so tomorrow it should be fairly easy I'll just be reading through but now I need to get back to the glass which so last thing I was thinking of was the gondola highest I'm going to go through my notes from Tuesday I think and see if I can flesh that out a little bit more and then start writing so it took me a while to get into writing today and I think it's because like I was trying to get this gondola scene done and it's just not working and it's because like just the relationship between Roberto and Chiara like Roberto was sort of acting in a way I wanted him to act for the plot as opposed to a way I think he'd really act so I still need to work on that a bit more so instead I jumped forward to when they've almost reached the glass which so there's like this sort of swamp scene very much swamp of sadness in never ending story though I've got to work it up a bit more so um yeah I moved on to that and it still needs a bit of work but I'm pretty happy with what I've done so I did an hour and 15 minutes 2,289 words which means I still have like over 6,000 words to do today if I want to be on track but like we've said I'm not going to worry about being on track so I'm at 18,151 words for Nanarimo and now Drew and I are going to go to the Christmas markets good morning and a happy Sunday so I woke up this morning and I actually wanted to write like I don't remember the last time I felt like that maybe in Porto I'll need to watch that vlog again but I don't think so like I think in Nice and in Porto I was writing to get back into the habit but and while I like when I got into it I'll get into a good scene I was enjoying it that I didn't really like feel the urge to write if I hadn't made myself do what I wouldn't have done it and then today like I woke up and I wanted to write so I wrote so I've done an hour and like 826 words my new daily total I need is about 10,600 a day so good luck with that Jackie but I did 826 words it was just going through what I done yesterday and adding like the beginning of the scene because I've sort of started partway through the scene so now I've had a break to have breakfast in a shower Drew and I are planning on doing a short trip today to see a fork in Lake Geneva I will get footage so you know what I'm talking about but he's only just gotten up it's like 10 30ish I think so he's just gotten up which means it's going to be good hour before we leave so that means another hour of writing and then for the freelance work I think I'll just take my laptop with us because it's like a 20 minute to half hour train trip so I can do a little bit on the way there and a little bit on the way back I actually feel like I did most of the heavy lifting yesterday with reorganizing the chapters so now it'll just really be reading through so that shouldn't take too long have you ever had that moment when you're writing and you're like how bad a person do I want to make my main character and I just had a moment like that because so we've finally met the glass which we don't know she's a witch yet but we've met her she's made her entrance and Kiara like needed to choose between her and Roberto and as I was writing the scene I had an idea that it could be like a life or death thing so they're basically in a swamp that's entirely made out of glass and the witch does something and the pool underneath Roberto changes back into water and he's drowning and the witch makes her choose between going with her or saving Roberto and that's actually like a pretty bad thing to do like she's basically leaving her best friend to die and I'm writing this going like I want the stakes to be high I can't think of a higher stakes thing than this but is this something that like you know I don't know if she's redeemable will readers still want to read about this character when they think she's killed her best friend so that's fun so I did another like 18 I was going to say 18,000 1800 words or so so today I'm at 2,718 words out of my 10,616 that I meant to hit today I don't know if I'll do any more writing when we get home this afternoon but even if I don't I'm really happy with what I've written today I think have made good progress and I think if I do just end up being a weekend writer then doing two to three thousand words on a saturday and a sunday like that's five thousand words a week that's still pretty good and yes it's not nano-rimo levels of productivity but you know 50,000 words over 10 weeks 100,000 words over 20 weeks like you can still get a couple of books done a year at that pace so I think I think weekend writing could potentially work for me but now I need to get dressed so we can see a fork it's seven o'clock and now I've mostly finished getting through this edit problem is I think my mac is dying so anytime I try to do something like updating a table of contents everything crashes and that's making it take longer but I've been through the book I have to do like a spell check table of contents and I need to go through the editing notes document which was like a supplementary document we always did just to give general feedback on the book and explain why we just made the changes we made and what the authors still needed to look at before the next round of edits but it's seven and I've already worked on this for probably three hours today now so I think that's enough for a sunday I can finish and the due date isn't until the 6th of December I was just hoping to get it done this weekend but it can run over to next weekend if it has to so now I'm going to have dinner and sign off for the day hello happy Monday it is the 29th of November so including today there are two days left in Anarimo I am probably 30,000 words behind let me check that while um I'm filming yeah I'm at 20,869 words out of 50,000 oh shadow um so obviously I'm not going to catch up it is coming up to 5pm now so I'm about to finish work for the day it is a little early but I also have a full day of meetings on Monday so I'm not going to get much more done I didn't do any writing this morning I decided to finish the edit I was working on yesterday instead which is almost done so I'm going to jump on and do another half hour or so on that and then hopefully it'll be done I did want to check in though because I had a book arrive so this The Witch in the Lake by Anna Feinberg Feinberg is a middle grade book that I loved when I was in primary school and it's said in the maybe the Italian countryside wouldn't it be funny if this was in Italy as well but it's said in some European village and there's a little boy who has magic and there's a little girl who's his best friend and she gets sent away to like a convent and there's a witch and I only have vague memories of it but I loved it and one of the things that's been in the back of my mind as I've been working on my book is that I feel like it's similar to this I feel like this has a similar atmosphere so I found a secondhand bookshop online and ordered it now it's arrived so I can read it and see how similar it is and hopefully get a bit more inspired for my book it is now December 4th and Nana Rhymo is well and truly over I did not end up writing anymore on the 29th and 30th so my final word count was 20,869 so about 30,000 lower than where I was supposed to be but I'm okay with it and I don't think this will come as much of a surprise because the evolution was really in week three not week four like I think when I started week four I knew I wasn't going to make it I wasn't going to push myself to make it and I was just happy to have started writing again which I am I haven't written 20,000 new words since Camp Nana Rhymo in April 2020 so that in itself is an achievement it's also a brand new story so one I hadn't even thought about until a couple of months ago when I had the idea and yeah I'm really happy to have made a start so including the words I did in the few days before Nana Rhymo I think I have about 26,000 words a lot and I think the final draft to this book will be around 60,000 words so I'm almost halfway through my original goal was to finish it by the end of the year which I think is still possible however in the last week there have been some personal developments happening which is why I'm only getting around to filming the south row now my parents and sister were planning to visit over Christmas it would be the first time I'd seen them in two and a half years and they had to cancel their trips because of the new coronavirus strain and the lockdowns and measures that are being put in place because of that so obviously that was upsetting and then I randomly started looking at trips to Australia and how much it would cost and whether it was possible and my mum was like yes you should definitely do it and so now we're coming home we booked the tickets last night so we'll be heading to Australia on the 24th of December which is really exciting we're going to stay there for a month before coming back it's going to be a lot of fun trying to coordinate work during that period because there's a 10 hour time difference at the moment and I have taken two of those weeks off but the other two weeks I will be working so that should be fun so with this coming up I actually feel less pressure to try and finish this book by the end of the year and I don't even know when I say something like that my initial instinct is to just go it's not a cop out I'm not doing this because I'm lazy I don't actually feel like anyone watching this is judging me for being lazy maybe you are right in the comments if you're judging me for being lazy but it's really clearly all in my head um but it isn't you know because I want to be lazy it's because I'm going to be off for two weeks from the 24th of December so I'm going to have like a good period of concentrated writing time it doesn't make sense to push myself to finish before then when I'm going to have this period that I can just dedicate to writing and seeing family and being warm again oh my god I'm so looking forward to summer so all in all this nanorama has been a really good experience for me I am disappointed that I didn't hit the 50 000 words I really did think I could do it again especially since like we had the week off early on I thought I've done nanorama with a full-time job before I should be able to do it again and maybe next year I'll be able to maybe if it hadn't been I was going to say so soon after our move and yes it has been a few months since we moved but that is a pretty big life transition and in some ways I think maybe it's still taking a toll so maybe if it hadn't been like shortly after an international move maybe if it hadn't been at this time at work when things have been incredibly busy and we haven't been able to get a lot of help just due to internal politics with our HR team and getting people hired and I think a lot of that will be addressed next year I mean I wouldn't have just moved countries so we'll be into a better routine and be recovered by then we will have gone home which like I haven't been home since August 2018 and I don't think there's any way I can convey to you just how much I'm looking forward to it because like one thing family I mentioned haven't seen my parents and sister in two and a half years I haven't seen my brother and his wife since before we left so that's coming up to three and a half years now and I haven't seen like any of my friends since before we left we've seen a couple of Drew's friends who they're my friends too but you know the ones that I brought to the relationship we haven't seen so just being home being warm being like in my own culture and knowing how things work and having a little bit of time to relax as well I think it's going to be really good for both of us and when we get back we'll have a better sense of both how long we'll have a better sense of both how long we want to stay in Switzerland because at the moment that's still up in the air but also we'll have gotten this little recharge this boost and I think that's going to put us in a much better place for being a bit more structured and organized and motivated and just refueled next year because I do feel like I've been running on empty for a long time I've been saying this for a long time in these videos and it would be nice to run on full again so I think next Nanarimo will be different I think I can hit the 50 000 words in 30 days but I'm not mad at myself for not doing it this year again I've got a good start to a new book I will be finishing that in the next couple of months and who knows what's next so if you're still here thank you for sticking with me if you like this video please like and subscribe and I would love to hear from you about what your plans are now that Nanarimo's over are you still working on the same project are you putting it aside are you working on something new are you recovering because maybe you did like work really hard to hit the 50 000 words and now you just need a break so please let me know where you are in the comments and I will see you next time bye