Day 11: Endless cravings

Okay, let's get down to the real nitty-gritty about this whole NaNoWriMo business. What kind of junk food (and how much) does it really take to crank out a novel?

When I started NaNo'ing on November 1st, I had an absurd supply of leftover Halloween candy: candy that I had bought and then failed to hand out because I (stupidly) forgot to turn on my porch light on Halloween night. So since no Trick-or-Treaters thought I was home, none ventured up the steps to my underlit, apparently creepy house.

For me to have conveniently packaged bits of candy lying about the house when I'm writing is a bad idea. I'm not one of those people who can ration my treats: I'm one of those people who will snack incessantly until every morsel of food is gone. So yes, I've already managed to eat my way through that absurd supply of leftover Halloween candy, finishing the last of it yesterday while I was home sick. That means today I'm left to NaNo in a depressingly snack-free household, and I'm still too tired/sick/lazy (you chose the adjective) to go to the grocery store.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not starving here. I have enough food to survive until I go grocery shopping sometime over the weekend. What I'm lacking, though, are munchies. I've no cookies, no crackers, no chips, no pretzels. I have a bar and a half of Burdick's dark chocolate for true emergencies...but gourmet chocolate is meant to be savored, not inhaled by the fistful. What I'm currently craving isn't good, fine chocolate: what I'm currently craving is Distraction Food, a sub-category of Comfort Food that you can eat by the bag- or bushel-full and then feel really, really bad afterward. It's this Really Bad Feeling that's the goal, believe it or not, because such food-inspired discomfort subsequently distracts you from the wretched pile of prose you're cranking out under its influence.

So, while I just passed (somewhat begrudingly) the word-count I "should" have reached yesterday, my mind now is fixating on the various sorts of Bad-For-Me foods that my Inner Glutton somehow thinks will make the writing go Faster and Easier. Between you and me, I know that gorging on snack food is not a good recipe for writerly success...and it surely isn't good for my waistline. But right now, my Inner Glutton isn't listening to reason, and instead she's chanting a litany of crisp and salty delights: Pringles and Doritos and Cheez-Its, oh my!

Instead of dashing out to buy the sort of junk food delights I would have gorged upon during my carefree undergrad days when everything would have been washed down by the neon-glow of buckets of Mountain Dew, I think I'll pop a bag of Smart Balance low fat, low sodium microwave popcorn; pour myself a tall glass of sparkling water; and KEEP WRITING. Sure, the life of a 30-something health-conscious So-Called Novelist isn't much fun compared to my junk food-inhaling days, but I hate to contemplate what my backside would look like, come December, if I were to continue my early November diet of All Halloween Candy, All The Time. Yes, I plan to be in this Life game for the long haul, even past November...so I guess that means being smarter with my writing distractions.

So, what sorts of bad-for-you foods (or bad-for-you habits) do you indulge in when you write, and what (if any) concessions to Good Health have you made to curb your cravings?

Word-count: 16,981

Last line: Whoever this Paul character was, Alexa decided, her spending time with him was an exceedingly bad idea.