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NaBloPoMo 2016 – Day 1 (Hopefully, this will be different)

Doing NaNoWriMo again. Taking the rebel path, writing essays instead of a novel or memoir other long-form narrative. Some folks are writing poems just like the PAD contest over at Writers Digest. I think I even saw some folks planning on writing plays this month. I should do that, but I’m committed to this idea of writing a book. Perhaps next month.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve started, but I’ve completed the novel once. That year, I “blogged” the novel by posting it piece by piece on my then-website. Since I didn’t give much thought about whether I was participating until about 9:30 last night, I haven’t thought about whether I’d post the book-in-progress here.

Doing NaBloPoMo, too, which is why this post is showing up when I also need to be average 1,666 words per day to finish the “main” project. I figured, if anything, that I owed a blog post per day, I’d have to sit down and make sure I wrote enough words to reach 50,000 by the end of the month for the “main” project.

This year, I have a huge advantage that I didn’t have in previous years — I have a desk. An honest-to-God desk where I do nothing but writing. In previous years, I’d fire up my laptop at 12:00 A.M. and get to it. But I’d be sitting at the dining room table or on the sofa with my laptop on my lap desk.

I once read there’s some psychological advantage to having a dedicated writing space. That when you’re in your dining room, your mind goes into the space of it being time to eat. That when you’re sitting on your sofa, your mind gets ready to relax. Maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not, but I do know that for me, it was hard to be productive sitting on the sofa. The dining room table wasn’t comfortable aside from writing my morning pages.

Now that I have a dedicated desk and a comfortable office chair, I don’t have environment as an excuse to not make a go of NaNoWriMo and complete. I want to win this year. And even if I don’t finish a complete, more or less, unified work, I’ll have much material to send out to places. Having fewer and fewer excuses is a good thing. And if there’s anything I want to change from my previous attempts, it’s that. I don’t want excuses and other BS to stop me from making what will hopefully be, some big gains this November.

I did start last night, but not at 12:00. I started around 12:25, when I felt like I’d have enough energy to write at least half of the words I needed for the day. And after I got done watching a bunch of YouTube videos.

I got there by 1:45. I’m going to write the last 800 or so, in an essay I’m liking so far, in the next couple of hours after I write this.

One day almost down.

(Update: 2418 words)