I’m writing about Monday at 11:26 in the evening Tuesday, so the details may be fuzzy. My vision certainly is, as I type through bleary eyes.
I didn’t get to work until about 9:45, tired as heck. This is going to be a long NaNoWriMo.
I was pretty productive, though, emailing several people to set up interviews or to actually send interview questions. I multitasked the heck out of my day. I had a phone call with my supervisor to talk about one of the donors I was interviewing. At 3:30 I put the football game on the radio, and it was good accompaniment as I went through my tasks.
I spent the time between work and NaNoing doing a little bit of reading, then catching up on the conversations at the NaNo website. I set up the group Skype session after a public announcement on the site, and was joined at 9:00 by Jen, Mary, and Darrée, three long-time NaNo friends from NaNos past, and Rachel, a newcomer. We had some good conversation and some productive word wars.
I hit 2088 words for the day, slightly ahead of the 1667 needed daily to hit 50K by the end of the month. I’m enjoying the writing, mostly, and think the characters are developing nicely, but I haven’t decided yet who the murderer is, and I need to decide on a character flaw for my narrator very, very soon.
It’s a cozy mystery set on a public school campus in Honolulu. Kind of fun to write. I had a little whisky cocktail, a kind of impromptu old-fashioned, with Suntory Toki, bitters, simple syrup, and ice. It was pretty yummy. The Toki is a thin, insipid whisky that drinks really easily, so it mixes well. I played my six-song Pearl Jam playlist on repeat for my soundtrack.
Then I did a stupid thing and stayed up kind of late reading. I think I was trying to put off going to bed, where I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well. I think I got to bed at 2:30 or so.
I had leftover Portuguese bean soup for breakfast and lunch. A slice of apple pie for a snack. A couple of hot dogs and the last of my manapuas for dinner.
There was very little texting Monday, and I barely noticed it. Sylvia asked if I have any advice for brown gravy and I told her I’m terrible at gravy, so my advice was to purchase some gravy mix. I sent Crush Girl a text to see how her weekend was, and got a short reply. And that was it!
It was fine. I was a bit absorbed in work and my NaNo activities. The Skype session probably helped a lot, too. Very good connection there with people I like a great deal.
I didn’t do any serious decluttering this week, a huge disappointment. It would have taken more planning ahead, with all the NaNo stuff I’ve added to my day, and I didn’t have it in me. I did throw a few things into the trash before I wheeled the bin to the curb, some things I knew I was going to get rid of and were just taking up space in my kitchen, so I felt good about that, but it was a token effort. I didn’t put a dent in the stuff I really want to get through, and this is not good.
I don’t have time to write a novel, as you can plainly see. This is the whole reason NaNoWriMo exists, and it’s why I’m here for it. Nobody has time to write a novel. So we may as well write one in November.
Hang in there, wherever and whoever you are. Things don’t seem to be getting better, but as long as you’re not contributing to their getting worse, you should feel okay. And if you need some connection, leave a comment. I have bandwidth. Let’s connect.