I’m nearly a week into this year’s National Novel Writing Month and so far I can report more success than I’ve experienced at the start of one of these things in a long time. The story started slowly (in my mind), and I felt as if the first few chapters were being yanked out of me like this wisdom tooth I should have had pulled sometime during the Reagan Administration. But we were all so giddy on capitalistic free love and wishing we weren’t so damned poor and uneducated that I never got the tooth pulled, and once I had the money to get it done and the abiding personal despair necessary to submit oneself to dental torture (this would be during the Clinton years), it no longer troubled me and I moved on to other things, such as weak ankles that turned on me faster than Hillary turned on Bill after the election.

But I digress. Weren’t we talking about my writing? Sorry, I’m in the bad habit this month of dragging every stray thought out until it’s coughed up blood and lies trampled in the streets like a dead–oh, sorry.

Since I will be out of town for the last five days of November, my personal goal has been 2,000 words per day. So far, so good. In fact, I’ve found that early afternoon is a splendid time for me to write–as long as I leave the house completely. If I stay in the house, I end up continuing the household chores I’d started that morning (which always include leftover dishes, baskets of dirty laundry, and crop harvests in Farm Town). So, my system is this:

– Do mundane chores in the morning (laundry, e-mail, showering, straightening up the house, more e-mail, icing a few people in Mafia Wars, checking the mail for royalty checks for novels I haven’t published yet).

– Pack up the AlphaSmart Neo, the iPod, and the Kindle and head out to one of my favorite places to write (either Cafe Kolache in Beaver, Pa., or a Panera Bread, even though their tables are way too freakin’ high to type at comfortably).

Once I’m out of the house, armed with enough gadgets to make Steve Jobs and Bill Gates fight over which one of them gets to have my baby, I get a lot of work done.  A lot. And, it doesn’t feel like work.

Next time, I’ll write about write-ins–those oddly paradoxical gatherings where writers engaging in the most solitary career choice in the nerdy world sit next to each other in public, presumably to write novels, and end up with collective word counts like 300 … or 217 … or 0 … over a three-hour period.

For now, though, I’ve hit my goal again, and I’m up over 12,000 words in six days. (Do the math, people! You can’t ALL be English majors!) And it’s 2 a.m. here (the real 2 a.m., not that fake 2 a.m. referenced in my last post) and I’m ready to hit the bed before my eyelids become as heavy as the cement shoes of Tony Soprano’s  turncoat relatives, where one false move earns you enough ill will from the boss to … oops, sorry.

But I digress … during a month where digressions are our friends. And, I apologize that this post has more links than a sausage factory.

Those of you who have known me for any length of time know that each November I participate in National Novel Writing Month. Fifty thousand words of new fiction in thirty days. Or, in my case, since I will be out of town from November 26–29, fifty thousand words in about twenty-five days. So, instead of the usual 1,667 words per day, I will be aiming for about 2,000. No pressure, though.

This will be my sixth year of literary abandon—starting in half an hour here in the Pittsburgh area. I’ve got my Moleskine notebook open, pages covered with scribbles … character sketches, random plot thoughts, theme information, etc.
I’ve got OneNote open—which is where I keep all my writing notes for all projects. I ingested my second cup of coffee about two hours ago, something I NEVER do because I get heart palpitations from too much caffeine–and even with
the impending time change at 2 a.m., I’ll still be up till Tuesday. I’m watching AMC’s back-to-back airings of “Night of the Living Dead” on the TV here in my office.

Even Murray, my office guinea pig and personal mascot, has been giddy and wide awake all evening here in his large enclosure behind me. The excitement in the air is that palpable.

Until about fifteen minutes ago, though, I had absolutely no clue where to start this piece of craziness. It hadn’t really sunk in yet that, at midnight, when I can officially begin writing, I would need to know what the opening scene was likely going to be. I had been so busy doing weird bits of research into the Knights Templar (don’t ask!) that I had forgotten to jot down a few ideas on where to start when I start. So now I have the opening scene outlined sparsely … and have no clue what comes after that scene.

This is why I love National Novel Writing Month. It’s so good for my blood pressure.

And, as I post my inner feelings of angst and euphoria throughout the month (often in the same paragraph), get used to this little guy. He’ll be helping you visually oriented readers get a quick idea of how I am doing on my word count.

T-minus 15 minutes! Just enough time to take a bathroom break, take a blood pressure pill, and take a handful of leftover Halloween candy….

BRING IT!

A friend recently mentioned doing a little freelance work indexing books, which, she said casually, would couple her love of English and data entry. I chuckled at this, but only because I share her enthusiasm for the mindless drilling of a keyboard.

When I sit down to write, I often dawdle at first by opening up my journal program and type-type-typing some pointless entry cataloguing a day’s minutiae, as if anyone on the planet would ever want to read such drivel, even a hundred years from now as part of a badly funded sociology project. It feels good to type, therapeutic to hit the keys with bullet-speed rapidity while my eyes and mind wander to more interesting tidbits around the room.

It’s more than simply a warm-up exercise, though it is surely that. It’s as if I am freeing my mind of all the detritus of the day—exfoliating my brain, as it were, of the dead skin of unneeded thoughts and concerns. I’ll spare you any more icky analogies; you get the idea. By the time I’m done with the journal entry, I can more easily move to the fiction, the deadline-oriented work, the magazine article—or, as it is to me, the stuff of life.

While working at my last day job, my favorite parts of the work day (not counting staff meetings and lunch with one of the bosses) were when I had raw data to input: articles to type, photos to scan. You know, grunt work. I loved the grunt work best. I still do. Give me a few hours of scanning documents or doing other secretarial or administrative tasks, and I’m a happy camper indeed. I like the feeling of accomplishment that comes with churning out a finished product. And that sort of
work requires less creative brain space than creating a world of characters and places and making them do interesting things and remembering everyone’s eye color for 75,000 words.

Give me a good, solid keyboard and I can type mindlessly for hours. If it’s my AlphaSmart Neo, I’m in heaven. Or my desktop ergonomic keyboard, which has just the right tactile feel to it. Or even now my 10” netbook, with its amazingly comfortable keyboard and size (where I am writing this entry). Gone are the days of my childhood, banging out words at half the speed on my portable manual Smith-Corona or on the gargantuan, very non-portable gray manual Underwood in Mr. Loughlin’s ninth grade typing class.

With newfangled equipment such as this, no wonder my friend and I enjoy mind-numbing data entry work. It’s an emotional therapy all its own. Perhaps we both missed out on promising careers in some company’s accounting department. . .
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