So, it’s November (how the hell did that happen?), and as some of you know, it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I decided more than a month ago that I was going to make a go of this crazy project again this year, and spent part of October planning and doing some brainstorming on an idea that I ended up deciding that I absolutely couldn’t write.

Then I spent part of the month despairing over what I could actually write and just in the nick of time: I came up with something. It was actually a serendipitous confluence of several things, one of which was a random search on Overdrive for an author that led me to a nonfiction book about a book thief, and the next thing I knew, I had an idea. That will probably morph and change a million times over the month, but at least it was a solid starting place.

Today is day 2 of NaNoWriMo, and I’m already at 4,376 words (With 1,667 per day as the pace, I’m more than a 1,000 words ahead of schedule!), and I haven’t yet begun to despair yet. There is still time for that, of course, and it will come, I’m sure. That’s why I’m trying to write as much as I can while I’m still excited, to make up for those days when I can’t. write. another. damned. word.

(I participated and made it to 50K words in 2010. There were days like that. Lots of them…)

This morning, my brain tried to do something stupid to me, though. It wants to do ALL THE THINGS. ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

I was on Twitter, and saw a link to a Poem A Day Challenge. And I honestly found myself thinking “I could do that. I could write a short poem every day, too. Just a short haiku or something. It would be another way to get words flowing. I could totally do this. Where’s my pen? Where’s some paper? Where are my glasses?”

Don’t worry. I came to my senses. I’m not going to inflict any bad poetry on the world. Maybe, eventually, some hopefully not too bad prose. We’ll see. I have a lot of words left to write. It takes a lot of effort to write a novel.

Some day, though, Mark is going to have to lock me up for my own protection.

(Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Here’s my profile on the site, add me as a buddy! srearley