Things are getting weird as the month rolls on. Weird, or just worse? Let’s go with weird for now, with the option to change later if need be.

So traditionally, Friday is a rough day at work because by the time I show up I’ve already worked close to 40 hours for the week and my energy and motivation are quite low. As it turns out, dropping 2 or more hours of writing per day into that schedule doesn’t make things better. It makes them, what did we agree on again? Oh yes, weird. Like how last Friday I started the day getting called up to see my boss. And how, totally unprovoked, he tried to explain how the company’s default setting is not “Screw Tgreen”. And how later that day the company did, in fact, screw Tgreen once again.

Friday basically helped me discover the exact amount of sleep deprivation that takes away my creativity and replaces it with exhaustion. I banged out maybe 1,000 words that night, half of what I schedule myself to write every day, and I passed out. Not to worry, though, because it’s the weekend now and there’s always extra time over the weekend to catch up. Except not when I’m taking a long-overdue trip up to my dad’s and I don’t want to spend the entire day being an antisocial writing prick. So Saturday I bang out zero words, which is considerably less than the 2,000 words I schedule myself to write every day, and go to sleep wondering if I was too tired to even enjoy the beers I was drinking, because I didn’t enjoy them very much.

Which brings us to Sunday. I was back home that evening with plenty of time to write. Except I still hadn’t slept enough the past two nights and there was stuff to watch on TV and maybe the idea of writing 50,000 words in a month is as stupid as it sounds. Quitting sounds like so much fun. Sleep, TV, reading, relaxing, no stumbling around like a zombie — just some of the things open to anyone smart enough to quit this contest. But I decided I wasn’t ready for that and my excuses were lame.

The thing is, that mind-fuck I mentioned last week? It taught me a quick and hard lesson. If you’re gonna try to pull a fast one on your audience, you’d better be ready to follow through on it. I wasn’t, and so after busting ass to get to that point, I had no idea what to do next. It was almost like Day 1 all over again, but worse because for several days I’d been craning away without any problems, and then suddenly I was at a dead stop. That’s why quitting seemed so attractive. Sure, I was tired and stressed out and the idea of some relaxing sounded so nice. But the truth was I was scared that I’d written myself into a corner and wouldn’t be able to get out of it. That’s why quitting seemed so attractive. And yet that night I stumbled to the keyboard, banged out another 1,000 words, and then stopped when I realized I was falling asleep sitting up, and also continually referring to one of my characters as “Ray,” which was weird since there’s no Ray in this story. Not yet, but maybe there should be. But I digress.

So the final score after the second full weekend of NaNoWriMo was that I was officially 4,000 words off schedule. Still at the halfway point for the contest and still technically ahead of a schedule that would get me to exactly 50,000 words in 30 days, but behind the schedule I’d set for myself. This sure felt like the Lost Weekend I was worried about last week. I needed to make a comeback and I wasn’t sure how that could happen.

Cut to Monday. Monday’s are hard to predict in my job. Sometimes there’s such a mad rush to get things out the door after a weekend that the day starts of like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, and sometimes I could almost slip into a boredom coma due to lack of projects. Today, despite the fact that my official schedule said I’d be busy as hell, turned out to be a boredom coma day. This could be the comeback I was looking for.

Small problem — I’ve never found a way to write much while at this job. Our desks are all out in the open and a piece of fiction doesn’t resemble the work I do at all. Plus, I didn’t even know if I could write any extended amount while sitting at that desk waiting for a project to appear. But I figured I had to at least try. And 4,000+ words later, I have to say I succeeded. By writing more than twice my scheduled word count, I made up half the Lost Weekend. And even better, I managed to write myself out of the corner, pull a second mind-fuck out of the hat, and set myself up for at least a couple of days of writing where I know more or less what I should be doing. Not bad for a Monday.

Things took an ugly turn at the end of the day. The “Screw Tgreen” policy was once again in full effect, and I ended the day on a bad note that may come back to bite me in the ass. I’m sure I’ll find out early Tuesday if that’s the case. For now, I’ll bask in the glory of a word count that’s only 1 day off schedule, not two.

Coming next, another excerpt. Probably no less crappy, but hope springs eternal.

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