I couldn’t sleep. I finally gave up at around 5:15, which means today is not likely to be a great day. At the moment, in fact, I’m sitting in the dark, only the glow of my computer screen lighting the room, with one dog cuddled up on my arm, the other on my legs, wishing that I could sleep as well as they can.

Yesterday’s words–eh. It was a day of jumping on every distraction. I finally quit when I found myself editing, not writing, but after I shut down the computer, I figured out where my problem lay (dialog going backwards) and how to fix it (reverse the order of the conversation). Today’s first task will be to get back to that problem and switch it up. I think I made it to about 700 words yesterday, so still way off the word count I need, but at least it’s forward progress.

I did discover–and I wanted to call it serendipity, but it really wasn’t, it was just research–a wonderful book that I spent a chunk of my evening reading, called Learning from the Voices in My Head. When I (spoiler!) wrote about someone with bi-polar disorder in my third book, I was a little uneasy, but I have plenty of experience with the condition. Right now, I’m writing about someone who could be diagnosed as schizophrenic, and I don’t want to minimize or make light of the condition. The book is written by a woman who has learned to live with the voices she hears. It’s definitely going to get mentioned in my author’s notes. It even–ironically, for the second or third time this week–made me wish I hadn’t dropped out of school. It’s the kind of book that should be required reading for all people working in the mental health field.

None of which is about writing. Ooops. Um, yeah, back to the point of the blog: today will include some outside of the house events. The indie writer’s meeting in the evening–I’ll see you there, Lynda, and Tom, I wish you could make it, but have fun at your writer’s conference! Yoga, also, and… drat. Something else. Oh, possibly a visit to the kitchen cupboard place so that I can get a final estimate on what my kitchen is going to cost to fix. More than I wanted it to, is the probable answer. That, combined with not enough sleep–well, today’s not going to be my 2K word day. If I manage to get some writing done, I’ll call it good enough.

(I did have a fun NaNo idea, which is to, at the end of the month, take all my blog posts, all my instant message chats, and any extended comments in other spaces and put them together with my actual WIP. I bet I can make 50K words that way. The book becomes a novel about an author who spends too much time writing the wrong things and not enough time writing what she should be writing. Sounds fun, right? And look, not even 7AM, and I already have 500 words for the day!)