How Not To Succeed At NaNoWriMo

Just thought I would come by and clean up the garden a bit. It's late fall now and there are a lot of dead leaves blowing around. While I'm here, I might as well provide a little insight into what has sapped so much of my attention lately. (Or not).

How Not To Succeed at NaNoWriMo.

1. Get a migraine.

2. Spend the next 3-4 days poking at your novel veeeeeeeeeeery slowly and making a mess.

3. Oversleep the day the migraine leaves because migraines make you tired.

4. Proceed to spend two hours looking up mythology and folklore references because you can't remember some obscure thing you knew 12 years ago that NO ONE ELSE CARES ABOUT anyway but is going to be used in the novel in some minor way that could easily be left out at the moment and by the time you find it you've gone down ten or twelve other tangential internet search paths because you are a geek.

5. Watch an equally obscure indie film on Netflix Instant. (Gee, glad I didn't decide to put my membership on hold this month. The movie is called Strangers In Good Company for anyone who likes indie films. I enjoyed it.)

6. Find a random song you like from a band in a genre you generally don't get into. Spend the next thirty minutes or so looking for more songs by said band to see if it's a fluke. (It isn't a fluke. The band is called Ill Niño-- Latin Hardcore/Metal band whose name might raise a blip on the radar of anyone into horror movies. They did "How Can I Live?" on the Freddy vs. Jason soundtrack in the early 2000's.)

7. Decide you absolutely HAVE to find another random song by a completely different, unrelated artist (Christian folk-pop singer Brooke Fraser) and hunt through all your music to figure out if you have it or if you need to listen to it on YouTube.

8. Eat lunch. (Yummy, beef stew and corn on the cob.)

9. Look at your current chapter and go "Yuck, this is a mess."

10. Decide you don't want to deal with it yet, justify your procrastination by saying, "Well, I'm way ahead anyway. I haven't done anything but write the stupid book for a week," then hop off to post lists on your blog.