NaNoWriMo Day 5

I’m start­ing to ques­tion my com­mit­ment to the cause. Haven’t got­ten any writ­ing done today, just haven’t had the time. Part of that is being so very tired from last night and need­ing a nap, but I could have gone home to write after work instead of going over to a friend’s to help him reflash his phone.

It’s a self-​discipline prob­lem, pure and sim­ple. With­out Josh to race against for the month, there’s really no con­se­quence I care about if I blow off a day. I’m only hurt­ing myself, because every day I don’t write is a day with­out my book, but there’s so much more to do (tomor­row is both Max­i­mum Geek and a Bron­cos game, then Fri­day is gam­ing and I des­per­ately need to get my Rock Band on after miss­ing it last week). Right now the ten­ta­tive plan is to make it up over the week­end with some 5000 – 7000 word marathons, but what are the odds noth­ing is going to pop up unex­pect­edly over the weekend?

And in another sense, the heat is off. I’ve been hold­ing off on start­ing Ghost Ronin for months, wait­ing for NaNoW­riMo to begin. Now that it has and I’ve started the book, why not write it at my own pace? The begin­ning, with Mike and Chris in Iraq, was the hard, intim­i­dat­ing part. Once I get get my main char­ac­ter blown up, I’m back into more famil­iar plot ter­ri­tory, vari­a­tions on a theme I’ve been work­ing on for two decades. I have a lot of new sur­prises in store for this (final?) ver­sion, but still not as scary for me as a writer as try­ing to write con­vinc­ingly about being on the ground in Basra.