Drop and Give Me Fifty

Welcome to Bootcamp, soldier. You will hate me by the time this is over, but deep in your lazy, pathetic heart, you’ll also thank me.

I see by your record you wrote a book last year. And one the year before.

Who the hell cares? Look around you. You see all these people sweating over their novels? You see them losing sleep, downing sugar and caffeine just to get another 100 words squeezed in? They’re writing a novel each year, too.

And you know what? They have jobs. Classes. Small children. Spouses who aren’t doing this with them. What’s your job, soldier? What do you do every day?

Oh, you’re a writer. I get it. You stay home all day to write because your husband makes it possible. For your career. Sure.

So, why is it you haven’t written another book since the last NaNoWriMo? What? You were busy? Tell it to the people working hard all day who still manage to write after they get home.

Welcome to hell month, soldier.

Your job is to write. You’ve got all day to pound out 2000 words. That’s your day job, princess. Every weekday. Monday through Friday. Too tough? Then quit your whining and go get a real job.

Got it? 2000 words a day is what you do for a living.

Now, you see all those fine people working their fingers to the bone to write 2000 words per day for NaNoWriMo after work or school? Yeah. Them. If you want to say you’re doing NaNoWriMo, hotshot, then you do it with them. But guess what? That’s another 2000 words per day.

Suck it up, girly. I won’t make you work weekends. Do your 4,000 during the week which equals work plus NaNo. Take the weekends off. Rest up. Do your NaNo 2000 on Saturdays and Sundays and call it quits. I’m not a complete monster.

Why am I so hard on you, you ask? Because you have no discipline, soldier! If you wrote a measly 1000 words a day every single day for the last year, you’d have 365,000 words. That’s almost four books. What did you do? Blog posts? A few short stories?

Yeah. That’s what I thought. Slacker.

Bootcamp lasts a month. When it’s over, you can thank me for the new habit of writing every single day. You’ll be able to write 2,000 words every weekday without breaking a sweat. When you have edits to do, you can take it down to 1,000 a day until you’re done.

Cry all you want. Sleep when it’s over. Quit being a pansy and let’s build up some writing muscles.

Now get back to work, soldier.

R.L. Naquin

Rachel is the author of the urban fantasy Monster Haven series from Carina Press. She believes in magic, the power of love, good cheese, lucky socks, and putting things off until stress gets them done faster at the last minute. Her home is Disneyland, despite her current location in Kansas.