Week three of NaNo -where's my brain?

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Normally, I love Mondays. Seriously. Specifically Monday Mornings. Sure, Monday evening brings How I Met Your Mother, but it's the mornings that get me going. I am the dreaded morning person, up and doing stuff before the sun, so by the time evening rolls around, it's not uncommon for me to turn into a pumpkin somewhere in the middle of dinner, fighting valiantly to stay awake until the end of a favorite program, and then crash. Mornings, though, I can spring out of bed, head to a local coffee shop, obtain beverage and bagel and start pounding keys.

The difference here is that we're in week three (or four? Are there five weeks in November? Is it really Monday?) of NaNoWriMo. Although my stats page says that if I stick with my current pace, I will finish on time, there's still the anxiety of chipper posts from people announcing they wrote the entire fifty thousand words on their lunch break and want to keep going. New ideas are exploding everywhere and it's oh so fun and oh so fabulous and...yeeeah, about that.

Honestly, if you're reading this and the above applies to you, I will shake pompoms for you with great enthusiasm and if you catch me at the right moment, I will even include a marching band. I greatly admire the super productive and they deserve every bit of acclaim. Maybe some other year, that will be me, but this year, I'm the kitty above. Today, for example (or more specifically yesterday) I left my travel mug in a friend's car, which meant this morning found me rifling through conference tote bags because I thought I remembered a promotional sport bottle in there somewhere. The staff at the coffee shop have my traditional bagel and travel refill order down to a science and I am a creature of routine when it comes to starting the morning's work.

There have been days when I've found myself looking blankly at a friend, only to be told with a fond chuckle that it's okay; I've obviously used all my words for the day. Not, I should mention, because my head is that deep in the book -I love when that happens, though- but because pounding out my daily word quota (and note, I normally count pages, not words) is sucking my brain. I will admit that the discipline is my main reason for doing NaNo this year. Will the NaNo story live past December? Maybe. Too soon to say at this point, but I'm in it for the discipline, so I will do today's words today and deal with tomorrow when tomorrow comes. I have learned that I need to do my blorch first, then make my outline, then it's time for actual readable writing. I need to be able to talk to other writers, online and in person, about my characters and story the same as I talk about people we know in real life. My characters are real; they may live in my head, but they are alive, and I need to talk about them. None of this is better or worse than anybody else's process, but it's mine and I embrace it and dance with it, even if it does end up looking like Victor Frankenstein dancing with the reanimated corpse of his beloved in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.