Day One: a new habit

I'm off and running on this year's silly attempt to write a novel in a month. I'm not a novelist: fiction isn't my preferred genre. But once a year for the past several years, I throw that notion of "novelist" and "fiction" out the window to crank out 50,000 words of something during the month of November. I often refer to it as being a cerebral enema: it ain't pretty, but occasionally it's good to get it out of you, no matter what (or how shitty) "it" is.

And so this morning I began a new "at least for November" habit. After breakfast, instead of reaching for my Moleskine to scribble my requisite couple of daily pages, I reached for my laptop and typed. Being a sucker for consistency, I set a kitchen timer: 40 minutes. And although I was aiming for 2,000 words--a daily dose that would bring me to 50,000 in less than a month--I typed 1,729 words instead, already surpassing by 8:30am the 1,667 daily words that add up to 50,000 if you do them for 30 days.

Doing NaNoWriMo, you see, isn't about writing: it's about math. "Writers write," the oft-repeated slogan says, but I beg to differ. During the month of November at least, writers COUNT.

Word count: 1,729
Where & when: at my kitchen table, after breakfast
Last line: She realized that reality, like thought and the networked nerves that carry it, is a netting web of infinitesimal fineness, and like a seamstress going blind over painstakingly intricate embroidery, she just might go crazy trying to trace the progress of one thought isolated in innocent simplicity from the tangle within which it hid.