The 26-hour day

I've been moving along at a screaming pace (for me) on my novel — with 2,353 words on Friday, 1,695 words on Saturday, and a whopping 3,169 words last night (867 of those being after midnight), I had a 7k weekend and am now nearly 5 days ahead of schedule on my word count.

This is a dramatic difference from previous years.  The last 4 years I've crashed and burned, and even though I reached 50k the first year, I struggled to keep up nearly the entire month, and made it in just under the wire.

The difference?  I am, of course, sacrificing time usually spent on other activities.  I'm not reading my favorite blogs as regularly as usual, I have a little less client work than I used to, I haven't been riding Panama as much as I did during previous years, and my husband and I have been watching less TV in the evenings.  I think there's probably a little bit of sleep deprivation going on here too, but nothing too extreme, even for me.

But that of course isn't the only explanation, since I also have a new part-time job that takes a minimum of 3 hours out of each weekday, and I don't have much time to write at all on Saturdays, when I'm busy practically from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed.  And when you consider all the other draws on my time this month — vet appointments for our dog Grace, who is starting physical therapy for her hip dysplasia, and at least one morning ride a week — I think it probably makes up for all the things I'm sacrificing for writing time.

So why is it that I've been able to not just keep up, but stay ahead of schedule?  Dare I hope that my part-time job has encouraged me to be a little more efficient in the time that is allotted for client work and fiction writing?  I don't know if I'll go so far as to say that yet, but obviously I can't have added a couple of extra hours to my day, so it's got to be a good sign!