Na-WTF-Was-I-Thinking-Mo

Listening to: Say Anything "Alive With the Glory of Love"

So NaNoWriMo has begun.

Could someone, please, just do me this favor. Answer a single question for me:

What the hell did I get myself into?

In all seriousness, my first day went well, although it got off to a rocky start. I couldn't start at midnight on November 1, as I wanted, because we were throwing a Halloween party. Writing is important to me, NaNo is important to me, but when my guests need drinks, they need drinks, yo. And no one else is going to make them!* Plus, the Naked Pirate drink my brother introduced me to was quite popular that night, and no one else quite knows how to make it.**

So I got started Saturday afternoon. Of course, before I began, I had to do the following:

• Spill coffee on my laptop. Just on the edge, but it slipped into a vent and into my headphone and line-in jacks, leaving me with some sound problems and a laptop that needed to be dried out before I could use it.
  
• Decide to handwrite for the first day.
  
• Find a notebook that has more than three consecutive blank pages.
  
• Search desperately for my pink bandana. This, by the way, is my ritual for NaNo this year. I must wear a pink bandana whenever I write. I have my reasons for it. It should be interesting when I'm writing on my lunch break at work--I'm quite sure the guys won't really understand, and will think I'm weird. Which, you know, might just be true. But still.
  
• Be unable to find bandana for ten minutes, and start to wonder if the universe really doesn't want me to write. At all. Ever.
  
• Find pink bandana, and finally commence writing.
  

I hit the target (1667 words), handwriting about half of it and then typing it all up and adding another scene later that night. I'd like to actually be at least a few hundred words over my daily goal today and tomorrow, so that I have a cushion built in for Election Day. I'm going to vote, go to work, possibly canvas or give people rides to the polls, and then party while the results roll in--none of that, except maybe my lunch break, leaves me time for writing. We'll see, though. It was a struggle getting more than 1600 last night.

Later, a post on the eternal struggle between my Inner Editor and my Inner Word Count Monitor. NaNo seems to bring out the worst in both these guys.

But now...I write!

Happy NaNo-ing!

*Some of my friends call me Martha Stewart Jr. This is only because, in comparison with them, I am fairly domestic. I have a house and a flower garden and a vegetable garden, I like playing hostess and making food for people, etc. In comparison with Martha Stewart herself, though, I am a bum on the street, drinking hooch from a paper bag and politely offering sips to passersby.

**Ice, about 1 part gin, 3 parts pineapple juice, and a splash of blue curacao or Blue Maui--just enough to give it a pretty blue-green shade. So. Yummy. And dangerous.

P.S. Currently at my mom's house, babysitting the sibs. Wearing my bandana as a headband over my disheveled hair. Spilled coffee all down my white t-shirt on my way here. Went to bed late and got up early, so the eyes look a little tired. I look like a writer, at least--you know, the kind that's been drinking for a week straight and maybe hasn't sold anything for a while and so must couch-surf. But a writer nonetheless.