What I didn’t do today

These are all of the things I didn’t do today on my day off from nursing, wife-ing, and  mothering.

1. Read. Well, okay I did read a little, but only the local newspaper, briefly, while I was eating my minestrone soup, with a cup of coffee and a gingerbread muffin chaser.
2. Knit. I have a hat that’s 3/4 of the way finished, calling to me from the jumble of bags in the Sterlite storage bucket in the entry.
3. Visit the ocean. I didn’t go. I wanted to go, but every time the thought presented itself, I had to push it away, and concentrate on what I was doing.
4. Bake. I have a perfectly good recipe for whoopie pies right there on my kitchen island; I can see it from where I’m sitting. “No! Focus! You can bake later!!”
5. Shop. I have a (large) pile of newspaper clippings, coupons, flyers, and circulars for amazing, limited time only sales on the presents that I need for upcoming birthdays, not to mention Christmas. 

What did I do instead? I wrote 2,243 more words of my book.

(Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t have the day off from houseworking. Does anyone, ever? I did four loads of wash, made butternut squash soup and baked a loaf of bread to go with it, took care of the chickens, and boiled potatoes for home fries).

Last year, I read about National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano) coming up in November, and thought, What a great idea! Maybe I’ll do that! Of course, I did not. Instead, I thought, next year…I’ll do it next year. Well, next year is now this year.

Oh-oh. Time to walk the talk. If I was going to do this, I needed a plan. NaNoWriMo waits for no woman. The premise is that you write a 50,000 word book during the month of November, beginning at 12:00AM November 1 and ending at 12 midnight on November 30. Somewhere in the world, the writing powers that be decided that 50,000 is the minimum number of words in a book for it to be considered a novel.

I figured out that if I wrote at least 2.000 words every day, I would finish my novel by month’s end (or at least 50,000 words of it). November would come and go either way. Last November came and went and I had no book to show for it.

This year will be different.

As of right this minute, I have written 42,139 words of my 50,000. I can see the finish line.

Since I’ve hit my 2,000 words for today already, hmmmm…maybe I’ll do a little shopping after all… 🙂