So How's Your Novel Coming Along?

I have to say that I was surprised by little to none questions about the progress of the novel I said I was going to start writing in my sabbatical. Whether this is due to tactfully wanting to spare me an embarrassing admission of failure, or sheer disinterest, I don't know, but I still wanted to give an update. Many people asked when I was back in town after my long summer holidays and two or so actually tried to make be believe I had announced I would also finish it, which, in all honesty, I never thought I would. Summer 2015 was exceptionally hot and I am not the type of person who would ever choose staring at a screen and attacking her keyboard if she can swim in a lake or sea instead. Let's just say that I had never been so tanned than last summer. And I loved it. 

I did write 9 chapters, though and have rewritten/edited them since. Other than that, not much action and only 2-ish chapters added since September. Apart from the fact that I spend most of the day Mon-Fri in front of a computer for work anyway and have an instinctive urge to stay away from it on weekends or evenings, what I am writing about is very personal and what I initially thought would be cathartic felt daunting, a lot of the time.

Like (hopefully) a lot of people I am VERY good at procrastinating even if writing ranks high up among the top 5 things of things I love doing most and have been telling myself that I will get down to writing, like, seriously, after I have decluttered my closet, read all the backlog of magazines and books, got X, Y and Z out of the way...you name it. Procrastination aside, I had to admit that my choice of "software" turned out not to be the most productive. I had looked into various applications, but then thought I would prefer something easy and cloud-based that I could access from any computer, so started writing each chapter as a separate Google doc. This was straightforward enough, but not so great for getting an overview at one glance and be able to navigate and edit easily. I therefore looked into the genre of writing tools again and stumbled upon Novlr where I have now successfully imported all 20,500+ words I have come up with so far and feel a sense of achievement just from looking at the sexy font and simple outline.

In order to put a little pressure on myself, I am putting it out there that I want to be finished at the end of 2016. There, I've said it!