I can't work from an outline either. It makes me crazy to even try. Some days I think I'm not working on it and then I realize I know what to do when I was stuck just the day before, and I realize it's been simmering in the back of my brain. It's the times when I suddenly realize it's been a month, or 6 months, or years and I haven't written anything that suck. It's been easier since I quit working, though. I think trying to make drug testing and pre-employment screening sound attractive 8 hours a day sucked the life out of my creativity.

I just sent Martin Carthy an email, asking if he'd be willing to write a blurb or, even better, an introduction page for "Famous Flower".

If he says yes, I'm going to fucking plotz.

(say yes say yes say yes say yes)

. Well, they would still count if I hadn't just deleted them. I was going all wrong and had to remove a scene.

A trick I liked from the NaNo site: when you get to a scene that needs deleting, just put it in italic. If you change your mind, it's still there; if you don't, it still counts toward your 50,000.

Dear fellow-NaNoers:

Never, ever look at the list of people in Authors. Because the first 500 people whose names contain the letter "B" have all written many, many more words than I have. And I clicked on a couple of their excerpts, and I wasn't able to say "Well, if I wrote like that, I'd have 20,000 words, too."

This is not a race. Make it into a race, and I will only depress myself. More.

Update:

I'm less worried about it than I was. 6,900 words now and the beginnings of a story I actually think I like. I seriously doubt I'll make anything like 50k words by the end of November, but that I'm working on it, and writing, and plan to keep on writing, those are the good things. I may just end up with a novel when this is all done.

I'm now tempted to look at the authors.

Not gonna do it. This is not about them. Besides, in my head, except for you, they all suck and have stupid hair.(Not hard to imagine if you visit the forums, she said, cattily.)

Deborah, have you always worked the way you do now? If you were, like Meg, somebody with youngish children, do you think you'd still work that way?

The way Meg works sounds very much like all the advice I got when I was in graduate school about writing your thesis -- the set schedule -- writing for either a particular period of time or for a particular amount of work done. This didn't really work for me, but I know people who swear by it.

Sometimes I do that. Say I need to finish a page, or write a hundred words or something.Cause I need to learn to stay with stuff.

Deborah, have you always worked the way you do now?

Yup. I started writing and publishing the first batch in the late eighties; Jo was born in 1979. I wrote my first 3.5 novels at work, managing a two-city banking regulatory law firm; I'd get in early, start writing, hand stuff off to my secretary (whose mama is a famous and worldclass poet, so she understood), get a shitload of real work done, and just write as it hit. I wrote very little of it at home, but when I did, parenting wasn't an issue.

And never an outline. I have a huge respect for people who can put dots on a page and then connect them, but I'm the same woman who did a painting which hangs in my kitchen. Started out as a pretty landscape, seeing if I could do it with wet on wet. The original idea was mountain and treetops, an exercise in perspective. The finished product has the trees and the mountain, but jutting out of the middle is a stone monolith with a steaming mug atop it. The painting is called "Java of the Gods."

Me and preplanned? Tricky. Very very tricky.