NaNoWriMo happens every November. The idea is to try and write 50,000 words over November’s 30 days. That would be about 3.5 pages a day for me.

So I signed up. I’ve been lazy with my writing, and I’m worn out on Warcraft for a few weeks, so I’m going to push hard during November to finish another book.

I picked Deathlock, because this is the third draft of the story and I actually feel like I’m finally getting somewhere with it.

I know what needs to happen. I’ve just had trouble getting it all down on paper.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but talking to other writers usually leaves me pretty discouraged. It’s like there’s an unwritten code that published writers must warn the rest of us (especially those of the rest of us who are young and therefore more likely to be out of our minds with unrealistic expectations, like me) that we’re going to fail.

I’ve read the books, done my research. I know that you get a lot of rejections before anyone accepts your work. But it’s just kind of discouraging to hear all the time. It’s everywhere, that one simple line: “Expect to fail.”

And some people are so concerned with getting that through your head that they don’t tack on anything encouraging until the end, like “Expect to fail miserably at least 100 times and then maybe in 10 years you’ll find someone stupid enough to publish you.” Something like that happened to me, though I exaggerate with “stupid enough to publish you.” But the woman didn’t even bother to say something upbeat, like “Keep trying and editing, and it will happen.” She just related her own horrible experience, told me not to be surprised if the same happens to me (nonfiction writer, completely different sort of market), and left it at that.

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I’ve been reading over previous posts and came across the one on how much I hate cat gifts. And earlier today I was talking to Alex about furniture and how, when we get our own house, I want to save up for quality furniture that we’ll keep for the rest of our lives.

So, as I’m wont to do, I went to Amazon and perused their furniture section for decorating ideas. And what I noticed was that they have a lot of furniture that I don’t like. And I tried to narrow down my criteria for furniture and came up with the following list:

• Comfortable
• Attractive
• Useful
• Unassuming

For example, the image to the right is of an ottoman and a chair. The ottoman is pretentious and ugly, like someone tried to take a graduation cap and put it on a box. But the chair looks nice, matches my color scheme, would be a lovely place to read, would probably make the cat happy, and would be perfect for my husband’s best friend, who likes to break the arms of his own chairs so he can sit in them with his legs crossed.

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So I watch about four channels, total. Cartoon Network, USA, TNT, and TBS. When Disney is an option, I watch that too (I miss Disney).

When I sat down to watch TV and write a bit, I found that TBS had sports. TNT had movies. I said to myself, “Gee, would I rather watch yucky boring sports or fun movies I haven’t seen in forever?”

While I was enjoying the most obvious choice, they interrupted the movie to say “Sports is more important. Let’s force it on you.” Like it was a tornado watch or something. And they proceeded to play sports instead of my movie.

Grumble grumble. Julia Stiles was all about to show Sean Patrick Thomas that she had the awesome ballet moves in a satisfying “Ha, take that” moment.