NaNoWriMo - Week 2

You probably thought I've given up. But HA! I have not. Although I will admit my progress towards this "novel" is consideribly slower than anticipated. I've come to terms with the fact that I will not reach the 50,000 words by the end of this month. I just won't. I'm not a professional writer, I don't have that kind of dedication yet.

BUT I am still writing. I just write a little bit each day, a few hundred words, and I'm working away at getting something down. I finished doing a rough outline, which they call phrasing, and it's really helped me to see where I'd like my story to go.

This week I'm on a strict no video games fast, which at only a day and a half in I'm already twitching like a crack fiend. I have 4 books lined up to read and one, Enders Game, I have to return to the library by Friday unless I want to renew it again. I also just started into The Other Boleyn Girl for the Vaginal Fantasy book club and I already know I'll have to renew it past it's due date of next Friday. I have to get focused on my writing and reading and as much as I love them, video games are a distraction. They have given me inspiration, but mostly they're just there to lure me into my nightly binge on Minecraft, Guild Wars 2 and whatever else I'm into at the moment.

But enough about my addiction, I promised you a small snippet from my book. :)

I moved to Raleigh a year ago, before my father died, to start work at Katech Pharmaceutics in the “social media department”. When I took the job I thought I’d be working with a bunch of other recent college grads, snapping pictures and adding filters to the new drugs and tweeting about how we save lives with our products, when in reality I was the social media department. We had one other guy, in his late 50’s, who was our Head of Advertising and all he ever did was create brochures in word that we would hand out at trade shows. To say we were at the top of our marketing game would be a complete understatement; bottom of the ocean, really. Katech was, and still is, in a period of transition of rebranding to become a hip, cool drug company. Hence, where I come in. I don’t like to toot my own horn, but when I joined the company our Twitter account had three followers – myself, Sean and a blank spam account. Now, we are not only Twitter verified but we have all major hospitals in the Southeast United States following us as well as major television networks where our future ads will run. I also convinced them to hire one more person to help me out, but he’s only a lonely intern. Hey, take what you can get, right?

I make my job sound glamorous, but really half my time is spent dredging through parts of the Internet where boring isn’t even the appropriate word. The other half is me running around like a chicken with my head cut off, arranging and attending meetings with everyone inside and outside the company. Today was one of those days where I should have been in the office 45 minutes ago so I could have had ample time to prepare for the meeting with Barely & Talm, a major advertising company we hired as a consultants on our marketing and advertising strategy. These guys were the real deal, the Walmart to our Mom & Pop shop. If we wanted anything out of these guys, we had to know the answers to their questions before they even knew what their questions would be.

How do you clear away distractions?

What's your favorite way of "getting in the zone"?