writing in Boston

I kind of liked Boston, what little I saw of it. Our hotel wasn’t all that great, and there is a lot of construction going on in that particular area, so it was noisy. We had a free afternoon, so my co-worker and I went across the street to Faneuil Hall, which is a marketplace-type area. I had a nice big hot bowl of pad thai that wasn’t overly spicy, and then a dark chocolate peanut butter cup for dessert. It was pretty much the best meal I had in the three days I was there.

Thirty can make the mind reel and make you do strange things, can’t it? I think that’s partly why I’m so into this NaNo thing – it keeps my mind off it, among other things. My mad dash for an accomplishment before the year is out. I am up to about 9000 words in my NaNo novel, which puts me a bit ahead actually, as my goal is 2000 words a day, so by today I should be up to 8000 words. I figure I may as well work ahead early, so that if I start to slack off at some point, which could be inevitable, I won’t have to do too much catch up. I ended up starting by just writing out the plot in paragraphs and phrases as they occurred to me, and then I just keep expanding on it, either adding description or dialogue where appropriate, and skipping around a lot, so if I get bored or stuck on a particular spot, I move to somewhere else in the list of plot points and start on that. Because I know this draft will be pretty terrible, and all I’m after is just a draft to be able to work with and revise (I’m so much better at revising and editing anyway), it’s not been too bad. It’s a matter of getting myself to sit down and do it every day. I have serious discipline and procrastination problems.