My muse has a pitchfork, and she’s not afraid to use it

I’m now officially NaNoWriMoing.

This has been made possible by two things:

1. My current job assignment is in flux, I’m reporting to a new boss, and he has been extremely uncommunicative about what I should be doing for him. This is extraordinarily stressful, but it also means I’ve had a number of free hours during the day to get a lot of writing done. And if the stress and uncertainty about What’s Going On translates itself into the writing itself, well, hey, that’s a good thing, right?

2. Margie has been fighting some sort of bug, or been working too hard, or Kitten’s been waking her up too early in the morning, or something, so she’s been hitting the sack no later than 8:30 or 9. That’s given me some quiet time to bang out a few hundred more words.

The bottom line (literally) is that my word count (new) on the short story I was noodling around with is up to 12,442. So I really don’t feel like I can’t NaNoWriMo this year, because, damn, I am. (I am damn. Damn I am.)

What this doesn’t mean:

• I’m not going to obsess about the magic number of 50k words. Really. I don’t know that I’m not more than half-way through, so if I hit 25k and the end of the story, that’s the end of the story.
• I’m not going to let the writing interfere with the other special events going on this month, such as my parents visiting, Margie’s parents visiting, Thanksgiving, Christmas shopping, Christmas Card Sending, or such things. That was a big problem last year.
• I’m not going to let the writing interfere (significantly) with day-to-day life. No sequestering myself upstairs to catch up while Margie is stuck with the Kitten all day. No sacrificing building fence gates so that I can write, write, write. No letting this get in the way of my being a participating member of my household. No letting it add to Margie’s workload (aside from her having to respond to my incessant whining about whether she’s really liking the story or not). This was the other big problem last year.

What this does mean:

• I’m definitely going to bug Margie about a NaNoWriMo t-shirt.
• It means my boss will call me this morning and tell me about the job assignment that will consume every waking moment of my life between now and the end of the month. I guarantee it.

UPDATE: I kid you not, but as soon as I’d posted this, I got an e-mail from my new boss, asking if we could set up a phone call this afternoon to talk about my assignment.