A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most ass-kicking form.
—-Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide To Writing A Novel In 30 Days

My android tablet and portable keyboard, I stopped my bike ride on the Bridge Park over the Trinity River to get some writing done.

I’ve seriously tried NanoWriMo three times – succeeding once. The two times I failed I wrote myself into a corner – my plot had nowhere to go. The one year I won, I picked a novel that couldn’t move into a corner – it was an old man in a beach house during a hurricane, with the water rising. He would think about his life in a series of reminiscences as death approached. That way, I could always find something to write.

The crazy thing is that on the last day of November, at about eleven PM, my Microsoft Word Document had me at about 50,007 words, so I uploaded the thing to the Nano website. However, its “official” word counter had me about thirty words short. No big deal, right?, I had forty five minutes to write thirty words.

It’s impossible to explain why, but those were the hardest thirty words I have ever bled out. I crossed 50K with three minutes to spare.

So this year…. I’m looking at my schedule trying to find a couple hours a day. One thing is this blog. For the duration I’ll post my daily word count, a photo from the past, and a paragraph of what I had written that day. I don’t want to upload the entire day’s work because it is a shitty first draft and nobody wants to read those. I should be able to carve out a paragraph of interest, though. A simple blog entry like that will save me some time every day that I can use for writing.

If anyone is in the Richardson/Dallas area and wants to set up a writing time, contact me at bill.chance57(at)gmail.com. I’m also thinking about setting up a Writing Marathon for at least one day (maybe the Farmer’s Market?), if that sounds interesting to anyone (if not, I can do it alone).

Yeah… that’s the ticket.