Now that NaNoWriMo is in the history pages...

The month of November, most activity in my life came to a standstill.  Yes!  NaNoWriMo had begun at midnight, October 31, 2013.  Or another way of looking at it, 0000 hrs on November 1, 2013.  I, of course being a pantser extraordinaire, had no idea what I was going to write.

The week previous, I was getting ready to greet the little ghosts, goblins and ghoulies, though nowadays, it's more likely to be fairies, Yoda, and vampires.  Course I might have a better idea just who some of the characters are if I was exposed to littles under the age of 8 on a daily basis.   Can't even ask my sons as all the littles they're in contact with are in the age range of the teens and already playing such games as Fable, Halo and such like.  All Hallows Day, Mom and I got the little packages ready.  100 to be exact.  We weren't sure if we'd really need that many;  cold, windy and rainy.  After the event was over, I settled back to wait for the witchin' hour.  More precisely, the start of NaNoWriMo.

I had attended the Kick Off Party in Duluth the week prior.  Bought a new book whilst browsing at Barnes and Nobles: Writer's Guide to Character Traits by Linda N Edelstein, PH.D.  (Keep having to look up book titles-informed by Google I've visited the page twice which doesn't count the times I've just checked the description which has the info right there.)  I perused the book, thinking it had some good references.

Of course, I fell asleep, so didn't get the first word on the page until half past two or thereabouts.  I had been using the WriteWay program.  This year, decided to try Scrivener which I dutifully downloaded, checked out and thought I was proficient enough to write this year's Great American Novel.  Time came.  I couldn't remember how to get the story going.

Finally found the little doodad, the template created expressly for NaNoWriMo.   Of course, blank pages stared back at me until an idea popped into my little birdbrain, as Father so fondly reminds me.  Rainbows, the End of a rainbow.  Now, what.  I sat there staring at the page, for hours upon hours.

Even got up to take a break or two, as advised to do by many of the great writers when faced with the dreaded writer's block.  Checked my supply of tea, honey, chips.  Good.  Made coffee.  Did dishes.  Checked the supply of chocolates (which did last most of the month, even with Sister coming in at odd hours to noisily sneak a few, thus waking me up at odd hours of the day, mostly night.)

Nothing more was forthcoming, so I got the handy, dandy calculator on my desktop, proceded to figure out how many scenes I'd have to write to reach 100,000 words.  Yepper, I was going to do as many of the great writers over to the NaNoWriMo site do and hit 100,000 words.  Well, that took up quite a few more hours.  Once the number of scenes was decided, I next had to find out how to organize them.  Which of course led to me breaking down and checking the Help manual once again.  Happily duplicated so many scenes, I actually learned how to trash some of them.   Luckily, they were empty, extraneous ones so I had no compunction about seeing them in the trash.   Then, I learned how to empty the trash.

Looked at the clock and decided it was time to sleep, as no further ideas were forthcoming.  The last thing I did was open up a text document and put the word rainbow down, so I'd remember.  Put that on my desktop so it could be easily found.  Oh, the word I put in the actual template?  Bagamose.  The title.
(To be continued.)