No, No, NaNo

Some of you may have noticed the NaNoWriMo logo I added awhile back. You're probably wondering about my progress.

Well, let's just say...I suck.

See, here's the deal. I'd planned to use vacation downtime to do some plottin' and plannin'. Y'know...like during airport layovers...while sunning on deck...time when I could let the muse work her magic.

Except things didn't turn out that way. I spent the airport layovers in bars chatting with strangers. I spent the time on deck comparing war stories with my young pal, Ali.

It seems the muse went on vacation, too.

Oh, don't get me wrong. In a moment of clarity the morning we hit St. Maarten, I wrote a 1200-word story for submission to Cup of Comfort for their next Christmas book, so the cruise wasn't a total lost cause in the writing arena.

But I came home with nothing, nada, zilch in the way of what to write for Nano. Then, the night before, I suddenly remembered an idea I'd had for a series. Kind of a Stephanie Plum meets Elle Wood meets Desperate Housewives thing. Even came up with a cool opening.

So, on the first day of November, I cranked out 2,000 words in true Nano fashion. The next day, I hit a wall. I kept writing, but I quickly lost enthusiasm for the idea. It just wasn't working.

That's the problem with doing Nano for the fifth time. Veteran blog readers may remember my first foray into crash-and-burn writing. Spit out 50,000 words (that's 200 manuscript pages) in 3 weeks. Ah...to return to the "ignorance is bliss" era. 'Course the output was out-and-out crap, but still...last year, I managed 36,000 words of a book I'm still trying to finish.

Anyway...so on day three of NaNo, I decided screw it. I'll use the time to work on short stories for True Romance. By NaNo standards, I should be able to spew out five or six.

Or, two.

Bottom line--it's day 13 of the novel writing frenzy month, and my total is currently about 8,500 words--far short of the 21,658 I should be at. Writing buddies keep saying things like, "hey--that's 8,500 words you hadn't written before," to which I say: "But I probably wrote 8,500 words in the same period of time last month."

In short, NaNo is a bust.