My problems with AcWriMo

AcWriMo stands for Academic Writing Month.  It came about as an off shoot of NANOWRIMO, which stands for National Novel Writing Month and is basically a challenge to try and write a novel in a month.  AcWriMo was started by Charlotte Frost, and if you'd like to learn more, I recommend going to her blog which you can find here - http://www.phd2published.com/2013/10/09/announcing-acwrimo-2013/

Both last year and this year I have signed up to AcWriMo full of good intentions to improve my writing habits and to become more productive.

Last year I gave myself a word count for each day, but I think I ended up giving up halfway through as I wasn't really in the right place in my research to do lots of writing, just finished one project, too much actual research to do for the next one.

So this year, I decided that I would just block out an hour a day for writing.  Any writing e.g. this counts as part of today's hour.  But I can already see myself slipping off the wagon.  So I'm going to try and work out the reasons for this and use my realisation of these to re-new my vigour.

1. New Job - The 1st week of November (Academic Writing Month) has coincided with the first week of my new postdoc.  I think because it's a new job and I've had quite a lot of admin things I had to get done etc. I've not found it easy to say "This is my writing hour".  But a lot of those things are over now, so from Monday 9am-10am is going to be my writing hour and we'll see how that goes.

2. I don't have a paper in need of writing up - I think when I envision AcWriMo I think about having a bunch of research that I've done over the Summer that needs writing up into a paper, spending November doing that, and then submitting said paper at the beginning of December.  Of course the big problem with that is that I don't write like that, I do it as I'm going along, so what I actually have is a half written paper that needs more analysis.  However, this year rather than a word count, I've just got an hour I need to write in.  That leaves a lot of other hours to do research in.  Also, since I'm starting some new projects, there's a whole bunch of literature searching to write up.

3. I find writing in chunks kind of boring - I'm going to try and use pomodoros to get over this one.  It makes it into a kind of game - and games I like.  

Does anyone else have a problem like this, i.e. they find the idea of something like AcWriMo really exiting, but the reality seems like hard drudgery?  Anyone got any ideas of how I can buck myself up?