November 1

It's currently 9:40 pm on the first day of NaNoWriMo 2006, and so far I have a first sentence, scribbled by hand in a notebook. Oddly enough, it's mostly because of NaNoWriMo that I have nothing written.

Huh?

Well, I did a live radio interview about NaNoWriMo this morning on our local CBC station. Of course, the interview was scheduled for exactly the time when I would normally be hustling my kids out the door to school, and because I just couldn't work out anything else, I let them stay home. After the interview of course my daughter wanted to get started on her novel and needed some help setting up, etc. Then my son (6) had the writing fever and wanted desperately to work some more on a story he's been writing for a while. This means he dictates to me, and I type. So that was pretty much the morning, if you throw in a little necessary housekeeping and annoying things like showers.

This afternoon my good friend Nancy came over so we could hash over our (woefully lacking) plans for our novels. Just before she got here I scribbled that first line. Various other NaNo-related things like more typing for my son, fixing my daughter's desktop, and actually opening a file (but not writing anything in it) for my novel took the rest of the afternoon.

The rest of the day's been more of the same, including a phone call from my sister who's fretting about her novel already, getting my niece started on hers since her computer isn't working and she had to come over and borrow one of ours, and reinstalling the word processor on the laptop so that my daughter could finish her own word count for the day.

Now they're so full of Halloween treats they can't fall asleep, which means they don't want me to go downstairs to my office. I thought I could write the first few pages at the comfort of my desk, but I guess I'm stuck here in the kitchen and I might as well make the best of it. I'll open the file and try to get started. Because now that I've yakked my head off about NaNoWriMo on live radio, I can't very well afford to fail this year, now, can I?