Oh, hello there.

(Via)

Due to MAJOR nudging from my fan base, I'm back.

Because:

I'm currently in training for NaNoWriMo. That's 50,000 words in 30 days. That's 1667 words/day. Last year, Diana Burrell tweeted her progress as she did it. When she tweeted about halfway through the month that she'd hit 25,000 words, it changed me. I had heard about the NaNoWriMo, but didn't really believe it was possible until then. Sara Gruen wrote Water for Elephants during NaNoWriMo. I love that book and that was the final straw that legitimized the event and broke my fence sitting back to convince me to commit.

So I'm doing it. I love 30 day challenges and they suit me well. I just came off a few month challenge of sorts wherein I trained for and ran a half marathon. That's 13.1 miles, suckas. I wouldn't have done it--no way, except that 1. I treated it like a 30 day challenge and told myself I didn't ever have to do it again after I did the race. And 2. I'd already told several people I was going to do it and I didn't want to lose face.

Some of the other 30 day challenges I've done: write 500 words every day, Vegan, meditated daily, no sugar, and accessorize. Yes. I'm talking about jewelry and makeup. It was designed to get me out of my lazy, demoralized-because-of-my-weight-gain slump. And it worked.

30 days is a good amount of time to try out a new habit to see if I want to stick with it. It's very effective for me to think about doing something difficult for a short, fixed period of time. Trying to change things without the 30 day caveat, I have usually given up pretty quickly because I didn't want to do whatever thing forever. So, I reasoned, I might as well give it up sooner than later. Some things I've decided not to stick with. 500 words/day didn't stick. Vegan didn't stick, but Vegetarianism did. I don't meditate ever single day, but I do most days. I (mostly) don't eat sugar deserts and I often accessorize. So.

Preparation:

To get ready for November, I've scoured the NaNoWriMo site, read Gruens inspirational piece about getting through it, planned my Christmas shopping and I'll have most of it done by the end of October. I am cleaning my house thoroughly, cleaning it out, rearranging, taking care of lots of details. And I am stockpiling the freezer. To date, I have 1 dozen servings of quiche, 4 servings of awesome chili, 8 servings of bean soup, 1 serving of prepared brown rice, several Amy's and Kashi meals/veggie burgers, etc., 1 serving of taco meat stuff, 5 servings of butternut squash pasta casserole, an assload of frozen vegetables, and a gallon Ziploc full of granola. I will not be cooking in November except the day before Thanksgiving when I cut up vegetables to roast and make custard filled cornbread. That's it.

Conditioning:

Last week I wrote a 5,000 word story in three days which is, roughly, 1667 X 3. That was a good dry run. I didn't get the word count in three days. I took four. I found out it takes 1-1.5 hours of quality writing time to do 1667 words. After I work doing 5-7 massages, hang out with Lula and eat dinner, I'm too fried for that. So I learned I can't do it every day in November. I'm going to try to get most of my weekly word count in Sunday-Tuesday. We'll see how that goes next week. I'm going to do 10,000 words Sunday-Tuesday, which are generally lightish days of the week for me. We'll see how that plan works.

That's it. I'll keep you posted.