Confession Time

Ok friends...I must confess that, despite all of my excitement about NaNoWriMo, I just couldn't do it this year. If I had been writing diligently, like over achievers all over the world, I would have 25,000 words down by now. I would be half way to my very first novel. But, I chose to spend all of my free time prowling Facebook and reading other people's words (almost done with Unaccustomed Earth). Oops.

So, yeah. I was technically out of the race before it even got started, but I still get the most fabulous pep emails from the NaNoWriMo staff. Yay!! Decided to share one from the first week with you all today. This pep email literally made my day:-) Witty, informative, and motivational. What more could a gal ask for!!!?

In case I'm ever brave enough to actually attempt a novel, there are some great nuggets of awesome in this letter to keep my chugging through. If any of you out there actually took the challenge to heart and are not total and compete slackers like me, happy writing:-)

Enjoy!

Dear NaNoWriMo-ers,

I'm not even the tortoise of writing. I'm the slug. And you are more than hares, you're cheetahs — writing at seventy miles an hour. I have to fictionalize even to talk to you.

So it's October 31st. I’m back from trick or treating in a robot costume, worn to honor Isaac Asimov, who wrote or edited more than 500 books in his lifetime. After removing my tin head mask and my metallic gloves, I pig out on candy corn and think about today's accomplishments.

I dug a shallow grave in the backyard and buried my print thesaurus (starting tomorrow, the first word I think of is good enough, even if I use it seven times on every page), dictionary (who cares how ophthalmologist is spelled anyway?), usage books (I can figure out the difference between lie and lay later), encyclopedia, atlas, and my beloved books about writing. I taped blackout curtains over my windows. My techy friend spent hours tinkering with my computer. She's assured me that it will combust if I try to reestablish connections to the internet and email. The single thing I'm keeping is my cell phone in case I start to go into cardiac arrest, but the keys are smeared with battery acid, except the 9, the 1, and send. My family and friends and Meals-on-Wheels have sworn to deliver food to my door, which will be kept closed to protect the world from my intensifying body odor.

Now I tape my list of rules and advice (culled from friends, my mom, the buried writing books, and, mostly, my own hyped-up imagination) to the wall next to my desk.

Now I tape my list of rules and advice (culled from friends, my mom, the buried writing books, and, mostly, my own hyped-up imagination) to the wall next to my desk.

1. Sleep at least once a week.

2. Eat at least once a day, but not constantly. Don't forget the essential fatty acids (Mom).

3. If my fingers freeze from carpal tunnel syndrome, I have ten perfectly good toes, a nose, and quite a few teeth.

4. When I'm not happy with how things are going, turn off the screen and keep typing. Don't turn it back on until the crisis is over.

5. Don't check my word count more often than every fifteen minutes.

6. Dream sequences can eat up a lot of pages, and they shouldn't be logical.

7. Short words count just as much as long ones.

8. The perfect is the enemy of the fast. The good is the enemy of the fast. The halfway decent is the enemy of the fast.

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