NaNoWriMo Nonsense: Beginner's Jitters

Three days ago, I started NaNoWriMo, and I am having issues. For those of you that do not know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. During this month, November to be exact, people all around the world take the challenge to write a 50,000 (in my case 30,000) word novel during the month of November.

I first discovered NaNoWriMo after my ELA teacher, who we will call Miss G, told us that we would be doing it as a class. Miss G mentioned this to us at the end of September, which is very nice of her since I know some teachers who would tell us the challenge on October 31st and expect us not to be mad.
Anyway, I was not happy about this at all. I do not have time to write a novel. I have to read 30 books, do homework, play field hockey, play softball, study, try to get into high school, not get fat, you know? I actually have a life outside of school and did not want to have to fit novel writing in there somewhere.

Weeks passed and November began to approach. NaNoWriMo had completely exited my mind for a while, until I came across some archives in my friend and fellow Nerdfighter Dom's blog. She had done NaNo multiple times and had fun with it. Then I thought to myself, "Mary Rose, you totes got this." From that day on I began planning everything from the plot to the name of the duck in my story (its name is Ringo, by the way). In my pre-NaNo excitement I found this video by italktosnakes/Kristina Horner and an old John Green VlogBrothers video from 2007 (back when it was Brotherhood 2.0) where he talked about the challenge. Soon it became October 30th and my class and I were briefed on what we would be accomplishing this month. Miss G said that we would only have to write 8,000 to 10,000 words and they had to be hand written in a blank notebook. Yee-Haw.

Now that it is November 3, the third day of NaNo, I am frightened. My goal is to reach 30,000 words by the end of the month and I have not been following my pace. I blame this on the handwriting. It is so hard to count every individual word, and now I am wasting time typing them on Google Docs and pasting into Word after I've written them to get an exact word count. In the previous 2 days I have written a total of 1,462 words and I still haven't written anything today. I should be at 3,171 by today. I need to speed up my pace and find more time if I want to complete the challenge.

Ugh, but so many words.

If you wanna check out my NaNo Profile, my username is modonnell13. Add me as a writing buddy!

Write On,
The Real Mary Rose