Finishing what I started (in many many half hour increments).

Let's get this out of the way right off: If you came here with the hope of finding a tidbit about how to power through and finish your work in seventy-two hours or three weeks or some other arbitrary set amount of time, I apologize. I have zero helpful advice about how to finish anything on a deadline. But If you are like me and have an open-ended schedule and about 1500 blocks of time no longer than half an hour each, I will let you in on a secret. You can still write a novel.
Take this for example: for the past three months or so, I've been lugging my laptop with me to my oldest daughter's early morning folk dance practices. I sit in a chair outside the gym and listen to the Maple Leaf Stomp and get down as many words as that half hour practice allows. I try not to worry too much about whether they are going to be good words because time is limited and if I did, that would be at least 27 minutes of my time gone. Sometimes I manage seventy-five words, and sometimes Miriam Makeba comes on singing Pata Pata and I write almost 500 words and at least half of them aren't garbage! That happened this morning and when I looked around wanting to high-five someone, there was no kid willing to indulge the crazy writer lady.
So, yeah, it's not a perfect scenario, by any means. You will probably not have any momentum to carry you along, so every time you sit down to work, you really will have to force yourself. But it is possible to make progress this way, it just takes a little (okay, a lot) longer. Anyway, this is all to say that this bits and bites first draft writing process is nearing completion, so if you see me out in some random situation with my laptop (riding the bus, or out on the playground with the kids after school, or waiting in the doctor's office) and I raise my hand, it means I am done (!!) and for god's sake, don't leave me hanging!