So I took a week (and a bit) off from the blogging every day routine. I pretty much took it off from the writing every day routine, too. Oh, I think I opened up the file most days, but I can guarantee I didn’t get any thousand word days. I’m not sure why the pressure of NaNo gets to me the way it does, but it is definitely not meant for the way I work. It’s like there’s some little rebellious streak in the creative side of me that screeches to a halt when it feels pushed. When I was an editor — and really in every other area of my life — I am obsessively perfect about deadlines. If the work needs to be done on a given day, it will be done, end of story. But writer me just turns my back on the whole thing and pretends it doesn’t exist.

One day this summer… oh, bah, that’s a long story, and I don’t know that I want to spend the time to write it all out. But long story made very short — a long-distance healer told me that she thought I was more than one person. Another thing she said was that I felt to her like someone who was in a loop of “never enough”. I felt like the right answer to both those things was simply to acknowledge and accept, the “yep, this is me” response, but I think I would like to break out of the “never enough” habit.

So yesterday — 400 words. And they were enough. Also a ridiculous amount of time spent researching dogs to find out what kind of dog Rose might have owned when she was a girl. A beagle turns out to be the answer. Good Florida country dog, good 1950’s dog, and a good dog to be named Blue (because there’s a type of beagle called a blue tick beagle) which was the line I wrote without conscious planning and then had to spend hours pondering.

And today? There will be some more words. Enough to make me happy, I hope!