Breakfast is over, day 2 has begun and no words have been written. Except, actually, I wrote almost 500 in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep and realized that the plot bunnies were procreating. I had that “oh, you’ll remember in the morning” thought, followed by “no, you won’t, you never do” so I got up, turned the computer back on and typed notes as fast as my fingers could move.

I have not yet looked at those notes to see if they make any sense, however.

Today’s plan: to keep going. I’d like to get to the stage where I’m hitting 2K words, not just the bare minimum. (Yesterday I hit 1670 and quit, but then it was 10PM and I hadn’t had dinner yet, so…).

More important, though, is to remind myself to have fun with it and to stop, stop, stop editing myself. Last night, when I was deleting words as fast as I wrote them, I reminded myself that Russell Blake would say that I was carrying an anvil uphill. Put that damn anvil down. Nobody’s going to be asking me to … shoe a horse? hammer a sword? what the hell does one do with an anvil these days? But maybe that’s the point. It’s a useless anvil.

Hmm, I can see that I’m rapidly getting trapped in that metaphor and whether it’s suitable for the modern world. The other day I stumbled over a failed souffle in an article and when, out of curiosity, I began to research, I learned that most people know about failed souffles from Warner Brothers cartoons. I suspect anvils are much the same. It’s a visual metaphor, cliche because it has no meaning in our real lives and yet is easily understandable to most people.

Anyway, today I’m going to try to set the anvil down. 300 words written for this blog post and none of them count for NaNo. Off I go to see if I can pump out a couple thousand that will count!