Rise Above Mortal Distractions...

Creating another world, possibly in another place or time period, is daunting work.  Yet, over 300,000 writers have embarked on this adventure of writing a novel.  You may say, That's awesome.  But here's the caveat; these adventures must be written in 30 days.

National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo to its adherents, started in 1999.  People write about it, curse it, love it, don't know about it.  Whichever category you fall under if you're an aspiring writer, NaNoWriMo is a site you should visit.  Here's some good advice from writer Carolyn Kellogg -- Get off the Internet.  The other great (no-brainer) idea is to shut off your smartphones, click off the boob tube, and box up any gaming systems you have lying around.

Here in New York, there's a huge built-in distraction that's a hair problematic to ignore...Hurricane Sandy not so affectionately nicknamed FrankenStorm. 

I'm in Brooklyn and we're a lovely little island on the same piece of land as Long Island and Queens.  As you well know, Manhattan is an island as well.  Given that New York has not seen such a bad storm in 108 years, most of our infrastructure is below-ground.  Guess what the waters that overflowed their banks did?  Bingo!  Flood our our infrastructure including our venerated subway system.

I write all of this to let you know that even though my normally 40 to 45-minute commute was an hour and 45 minutes in length on Thursday and a little over two hours this evening.  Yesterday, a companion and I walked from E. 24th Street to Delancey Street before we caught a bus over the bridge (oh yeah, no trains are going over the three bridges connecting Manhattan to the outer boroughs).  Even with all of these distractions, I still have written 4,549 words and it's still technically Day 2.

Writing this post is part of me working on my second wind to see I can get in a few hundred more words in tonight.  The goal is 1,667 words a day in order to keep on pace to finish 50K by November 30th.  I'm figuring that with Thanksgiving late in the month the last few days are not going to be very productive so I should push for the higher word count in early in the month.  Gotta have a strategy right? :-)

So, if you're still here and reading this, and need to read some Sandy stories click here.  Then right after this, click off the Internet and get to writing.  We have only one life.  Let's do what we say we want to do and stop the games.

One last thing, you can't even say you're going to watch the NYC Marathon on Sunday to support the athletes.  It's been cancelled.