NaNoWriMo – Lagging behind

Like a runner in a marathon who stops for a drink of water handed out by some nice volunteer and then decides to stoop and tie her shoes, only to realize that she’s looking at the backs of all the people she was previously in front of, I am falling behind in my bid to complete a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November.

I haven’t worked on my project in two days. It couldn’t be helped. I have a few other projects that need to be attended to this month. And, you know, life. Not that any of that is a valid excuse; I’ve known since the beginning of the month that I was going to have to halt word production a few times in order to keep other, more important, projects in motion.

What could be more important than a NaNoWriMo novel, you may ask? Let me tell you – a novel (novella, actually) that’s really, truly, honestly, going be published next year and needs edits. A class which I’m designing for my employer. My freelance income. A dire shortage of socks that’s been plaguing O’Connell household for a good week or so. Phyllis.

Still, all those seem like thin excuses for not novelling. The few thousand words that haven’t been written this week plague me, and tomorrow I catch up. I may try to type a little bit before sleep tonight, just to see if I can get a jump on tomorrow’s word count.

Actually, no. I just want to see if I can duplicate Saturday night’s sleep-typing incident.* Which, by the way, is actually a thing. In the comments on that post, two of my former roommates reported similar sleep-typing incidents (neither happened while I was living with either of them, unfortunately.) Check it out. One of the incidents is NaNo-related.

*By the way, I’ve worked a little more on that passage I wrote in my sleep. If you’ve been following these posts, you’ll be happy to know that Ted has resolved his gender issues. I still haven’t managed to figure out what a truck’s “babing” is, though.