November 4th and I’ve nothing to show for the time except a few ideas in which to take a story I’m not working on for NaNoWriMo. Nothing on paper or digits. Fantastic! What have I don’t in the mean time you ask? Well, let me tell because it’s SO fascinating. I worked a 12 hour shift and I watched the first season of Dark Matter, a SyFy tv show put out earlier this year, the first 5 episodes of Blindspot, a thriller on NBC that just started a few weeks back, and old episodes of Star Trek Deep Space Nine all while eating chips and salsa. What could be more productive that than? Netflix will be my undoing one day. Thank goodness I don’t have a subscription to Amazon Prime. I’d never get anything done.
What’s truly sad is that I have even considered raking leaves instead of writing. Raking leaves! Who does that?! Yes, I would love to go outside and gather up wet leaves instead of sitting in my pajamas putting stories on my computer, said no one ever. Yesterday morning I spent a full hour looking at hilarious pins on Pinterest, another colossal and glorious time waster. Where do people get the energy and motivation to not only write for NaNoWriMo but to write enough to win it? If you have insights, I would love to hear them.
It’s not like I ignore my stories because I don’t. I spend hours upon hours thinking about them, working at them. In fact, I spent over two hours the other day researching potato harvesters and what it takes to raise potato crops. And yes, that research has bearing on one of my stories. Did I write a single line of dialog on paper? A plot change? A character shift? Nope, not a single word. But I did take great notes on how important it is to have the right ventilation through all stages of potato harvesting.
For setting a personal goal of 833 words per day in order to reach 25,000 words in 30 days, I am spectacularly in the hole; 3332 words in the hole to be exact. And just what am I going to do to correct this deficiency? Write? Don’t be silly. I’m going on a country drive to see the fall colors. I might even take some chips and salsa.
One Aspect 