Water Stops

NaNoWriMo is like running a marathon, complete with annoying hills, shin splints, and much needed water stops along the way. Today, I pulled into one of my very favorite 'water stops' and washed down some Gatorade-for-the-soul. It left me untethered and loose, spiritually limber. Refreshed, I regained my stride with goal of crawling inside my characters, feeling their embodied truth, and working (with reverence) from the inside out. Surely this will add to my word count. But knowing what a riot of energy and images live inside my own body, I expect I'll need a flashlight and some bread crumbs to find my way back out of theirs.

They say Week 2 is the hardest week of NaNoWriMo, the one during which most people falter. So leave comments to spur me on! Guilt, encouragement, accountability, public shaming . . . whatever it takes! My stride feels good right now. Heartbreak Hill is still weeks away. But a little cheering from the sidelines never hurts.

The Starting Line

OK, all the pieces are in place. I've cracked open the great starter kit "No Plot, No Problem!", read the instructions, joined the website, created the writing space, set up the blog. Let's see, what else can I do to procrastinate?

So much resonance between this and my other project: the Rocket Ship workshops. There's the excitement of beginning, the lessons that will be learned, and then the hard process of actually seeing it through. A skill, a capacity, that needs cultivation. I love the tenor of the starter kit (funny, compassionate) and think we could use some of that in the Rocket Ship in particular and the world in general. Functioning in chaos, walking on the high log of a ropes course, moving through the unknown . . . we have it in us.

OK, I'm wasting words here when I need them in my novel. 

Wish me luck!