Putting the ‘no’ into NaNoWriMo.

Lots of things going on right now, including work-related chaos that make arbitrary commitments against arbitrary timeframes less useful at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong. NaNoWriMo has helped me greatly. It’s made me better at writing-fast and recalibrated my sense of how much I can get done. I like to push myself, and that’s one way to do it.

Already, on the first day of the month, I’m getting pulled into the day job vortex. I’m in the middle of hot & heavy revisions on a different longer piece, and putting that aside for 30 days wouldn’t be helpful either, so I’ll press on. What I will commit to, though, is trying the write-a-novel-in-three-days process described on this site (except my ‘novel’ I’m aiming for is only 20-30k words). Should be interesting.

My desk: at some point, I seem to have developed a compulsion for saving little receipt-sized scraps of paper and writing stuff all over them. The library is good for these. (On my recent trip, I had two holds, with one pagelet each, one return receipt, and one check-out receipt.) Some of the writing is doodles. Lots of graph theory this month, particularly cubic planar graphs. Some todo lists. One crudely sketched calendar of November.

Besides that: pens, chocolate, yerba mate, xylitol, my Kindle Fire running the Nook app (which I discovered doesn’t work well with auto-shut-off), an unwatched Netflix movie, and a sealed packet of buffalo sauce.