Back to the Monday Morning Routine

As most of you know, I have no set schedule or routine. Everything I do is rather spontaneous, including work. Unfortunately my work schedule is ruled by someone else's spontaneity. But that leaves me time to write, sporadically. (Maybe I'm more sporadic than spontaneous but spontaneous sounds better.)          

So anyway, I went to bed rather late for most of you but early for me, around 2 am, figuring I'd sleep til at least 10 but nooooo! I was up shortly after 7 am, my mind racing. It hit me that I wanted to write an article for the Writer's Digest on this years upcoming National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. For those of you who don't know, the NaNoWriMo writing contest takes place in November, every November, where those of us who actively (and voluntarily)participate crucify ourselves upon the pen and let our blood intermix with the ink and commit 50,000 words of a new novel onto paper (or computer memory, as the case may be).

The deadline for publishing in an October or November issue of a magazine looms overhead at this very moment so the first thing I do this morning is... you guessed it, jump on the bouncer with my hand weights listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers. (My neighbors just love me.)          

I have no idea where the motivation for that came from. I'm not a morning person. My day starts around 3 pm. If I'm awake to see the sun rise it's because I've been up all night. For the last week or so, I've been waking up just after 7 and not always by choice. Seems the landscaping crew feels that it is necessary to wake the neighborhood early with their make-shift alarm clocks; mowers, weed-eaters, trimmers and blowers. And they do not give you a chance to go back to sleep. Seems that it takes an entire eight hours to trim the property here. And they can't do all the work in one day. The next day is for the mowers and the next is for the weed-eaters, etc. etc. etc.. And of course, there are the guys on the roof repairing the storm damage from April 8th. Arrruuuuuggg!!!!! It's a good thing I don't have a shotgun! Though I could learn first hand what my character Mattie, would go through as a sniper. Hmmmmmm. Anyone got a shot gun for sale, reasonably priced? After all, I am a starving artist.          

Well, after the bouncy thing, I rummaged through several years of Writer's Digest magazines, looking for the article that first piqued my interest in NaNoWriMo. Then scourged the WD website and finally the NaNo website and found no mention of the damn thing. I printed a bunch of info regarding the writing contest and checked my email. I wrote to Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, yesterday with the intent of designing NaNo products to sell through their website to raise money for charity. No word yet, but of course, he's in California. It's only 8 am here in Atlanta and 5 am in the sunshine state; he's not even awake yet.          

Then I fight with the computer. Dial-up kicks me off-line 6 times and I finally give up chatting with a friend on Yahoo! IM. So, now, here it is 11:10 am and I'm blogging. Not a word written on my screenplay, though I can hear Mattie calling me from my notebook. Guess it's time to get something to eat. Then maybe tackle my journal and chat with Mattie. I still have just under 13 hours to write today, minus two hours for the 24 season finale. Busy. Busy. Busy. TTFN.

;)