What I actually did: puttered around on the computer for an hour and a half.

And I wonder why it takes me forever to finish any of my knitting projects?

Last year, the gym I go to replaced all of the old equipment with bright shiny new machines that had TVs attached to them. This has its drawbacks (we are all working out together in isolation), but there are many benefits to this as well. One is that you can watch whatever you want without inconveniencing anyone else.

From what I’ve observed in the several months that we’ve had them, men in general watch mostly sports or CNN, young women watch MuchMusic, MTV or Slice, and older women watch HGTV, FoodTV or Diva. However, the one channel almost everyone has in common is TLC.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, I went to my usual machine, started my routine and then began to flip channels until I settled on something I wanted to watch for the duration of my workout. After a while, I look around to see what everyone else is watching, since it was mostly women in the gym at that time. The vast majority of them were watching “Say Yes To The Dress” [1. It's a show about a wedding dress boutique in New York. ], while a few were watching the news. And what had I settled on?

The Empire Strikes Back. NEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRDDDDD!

Some NaNo stats of mine for your pleasure:

• This was my sixth year participating, so this gives me a 50% success rate so far.
• I skipped 2007 because I couldn’t think of anything to write. October that year had been hell, and I wasn’t prepared.
• 5 of the 6 stories have been sci-fi [2] and the 6th story was a romantic dramady [3].
• Two of the wins have been with sci-fi and one with the rom-dram. You’d think that I’d stick with the rom-dram since I have a 100% success rate with that genre, as compared to a 40% success rate with sci-fi.
• Over the course of November, I had four days where I wrote 5,000 words or more, meaning that I wrote 40% of the story in four days. If I could only harness that awesome writing power, I could have been done in slightly over a week. [4]

A lot of writers say that sometimes the characters you are writing will sometimes stand up and wrestle control of the story away from you, and it sounds like a lot of malarkey, but there’s a grain of truth to it. For instance, all the way through my story outline, I had two characters named John and Paul. Halfway through the notes, Paul stopped feeling like a “Paul” and decided to become a Jamie. Okay, fine – it’s early enough to change. But then when I started actually writing the story, John stopped acting like a John and started calling himself Liam. And one of the other characters, who was supposed to be a airhead named Bijou, had a great moment near the beginning which made me decide that she wasn’t an airhead and “Bijou” was actually a silly name for her, so she started being called by her nickname, Beez.

And then there was the story. It’s the same story I started working on all the way back in 2003, and it’s carried me all this way without running out of ideas. There’s this space ship, and there’s this crew on this space ship, and they do stuff, and then there’s a conspiracy going on. Last time I wrote about them, in 2006 [5], I wrote the end of the story without actually figuring out what the conspiracy was, so this year I worked on the middle part where more people start finding out about the conspiracy and trying to figure out what’s going on. However, this year I did it from the perspective of a different crew on a different ship which I had mentioned in passing last time – not that I didn’t like the characters, I just wanted a different group of people to do things this time around.

And next year? I had this one character in this year’s story who was absolutely not what I thought he was going to be, so I’m thinking I might have him set out by himself to see what he’ll do with his own story.

[1] There’s a mouthwash for that. You might want to look into it.
[2] They’ve been part of the same story.
[3] Calling it “fiction” seems so pedestrian.
[4] Somewhere, my boss is hollering “if you could have harnessed that awesome writing power, you would have finished those post-project reports months ago!” To which I reply: “pthththtbbbbbb!”
[5] I wrote the rom-dram in 2008.