More than a dozen CWC Tri-Valley Branch members have taken the annual National Novel in a Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. Cooking, house cleaning and yard work will be ignored. Laundry bins overflow. The trash begs to be taken out. Our fingers fly over computer keyboards toward a common goal—50,000 words by November 30.
For the past four years I’ve begun my manuscript at one second on Halloween. This year, I went to bed at a reasonable time and postponed my writing until 6:00 a.m. The first sentence, “Move that bookshelf over just a tad,” hit the page. From those dull words that would need to be rewritten, a novel flowed like milk spilled on the kitchen counter. I surpassed the daily word count of 1,667 with ease that day and the next.
I looked forward to Saturday, November 3, with an extra hour to write. At 6 p.m., I passed 10,000 words. I extricated my stiff body from my computer chair and planned my next chapters like a mind game while my body rested. I looked forward to setting the clocks back for an extra hour to write. Why wait until 2:00 a.m.? At 8:30 p.m. I reset all the clocks and returned to my manuscript. No amount of coaxing would persuade my fingers to cooperate.
I used the extra hour of writing time to sleep—a rare event during NaNoWriMo.