This is my 7th or 8th year of doing NaNoWriMo, and every year I go into it with a slightly different attitude. This year I was looking forward to it for the past two weeks (of course – when I wasn’t allowed to type a word) but this morning there was very little if any excitement. And I had things that needed to be done today that did not allow me to sit and write, including spending 5, yes 5, hours at the baseball field while my son played his game AND the one that followed, because they didn’t have enough kids. He was psyched because the 2nd game was far more laid back and he got to try catching for the first time. He caught for two innings – the first and the last, and definitely did better the 2nd time. Maybe it won’t be a bad thing for him to try to pick up, although personally, I would never want to be a catcher. Way way way too much pressure. That kind of stuff doesn’t seem to bother him, though.
So anyway, I hit the minimum word could for today (the words I’m typing here don’t count. D’oh!) which is good, but really, I should have been able to do much better. The first day of Nano you should be like a crazed monkey, just typing until you pass out, especially if the first day of Nano is on a weekend. I feel like I did not take advantage of the free gift of November 1st falling on a Saturday. Oh well, too late to do much about it.
For the record, the first few pages of the novel are kind of a young adult thing, because I realized that my son and his friend are going to want to see what I’ve done with the names we all came up with for my characters. I don’t know if I’ll be able to carry this through 30 days, and there are no clear plot ideas yet (unfortunately for me, I actually try to NOT think about my Nano novel prior to November 1st because that feels like cheating. But that means I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m writing about for the first couple of days. We’ll have to see how that goes.
