I’m one of those people who listens to music as they write.  For me, I find that it engages the part of my brain that’s constantly twiddling its thumbs, restless and wanting to drag the rest of me away from whatever I’m concentrating on.  With music, that part of my brain is mollified and the rest of it can get work done.  I find it particularly useful if I listen to the same song on repeat.  That way it is all the easier to detach my conscious mind from the familiar tune and rhythm and words.  So far this month my songs on repeat have included Sufjan Steven’s “The Only Thing,” The National’s “I Need My Girl,” and Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.”  Right now, the song playing on repeat is Shawn Mendes with “Stitches”:

I love this song.  And I dance around while I’m writing.  It gets me funny looks at Starbucks, but it makes me happy.

Here’s a passage from today’s Nano:

In Tom’s estimation, God had a lot to answer for. So the idea of faith in God was sort of contradictory: either he had no faith in god and everything that had happened to him was totally random, answerable by nobody, or he had faith, and that God he had faith in had either made this happen, or allowed it to happen. Either way, it was a lose-lose proposition.

As anybody who’s even considered doing Nanowrimo can tell you, 50,000 is pretty daunting.  Like so many things in life, however, it helps to just concentrate on small chunks.  One word at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time, etc.  Right now I’m keeping up by rewarding myself with a Starburst every 100 or so words.  It’s like they say: the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.  My elephant just happens to be made out of candy.

Here’s a passage from today:

It was hard enough for Tom to admit that he had done these things, committed these terrible wrongs. To ask him to think more deeply…it was like telling someone that was being eaten by a shark to save themselves by diving right into the monster’s gullet.

One of the best things about writing is when the story takes a totally unexpected turn.  One of the most terrifying things about writing is when the story takes a totally unexpected turn.  The story I’m writing right now is not the story I intended to write.  Maybe that will be great!  Maybe that will be horrible!  No way to know without pushing through.

As I push through, have a passage from today’s work:

Again Tom was silent, although this time because he was working his jaw, trying to come up with an answer that was both truthful and put him in a favorable light. He was fast discovering that those two things were, in this instance, mutually exclusive.

I’ve discovered that if I wait until my writing is done for the day to post a passage here, it gets too late and all I want to do is go to bed! So I’m going to do my best to try posting a passage from the day’s work in the afternoon.  So here’s one from today:

Tom was momentarily irritated by that psychiatry trick of answering a question with a question and turning the focus back on him to answer what he himself had just asked. But he could accept that in this case it was actually a good idea, actually warranted. So what did he think his life could be?

I reached the word count that I needed to keep pace, but not that I wanted to get me over pace.  Ah well.  Considering I did all the writing this evening, it’s not too shabby. Here’s a passage!

It sounded like such a poor me, emo sort of thing, like there should be a million very, very tiny violins all wailing in a pity serenade, but it was the truth.

I made my word count goal last night, but I didn’t have a chance to post a passage! So here you go:

That in and of itself made Tom uncomfortable, that he was so predictable that his therapist didn’t even have to ask him to finish the goddamn sentence.

Today I had that blissful experience of entirely shutting my inner critic down and just writing, just letting the words flow from my brain to my fingers to the keys to the screen.  God, I love that, and it’s been way too long.  Here’s a passage:

The holdouts wouldn’t bring things with them anymore. No flowers, no balloons, no copies of the latest schlock to make it to the top of the New York Times bestseller’s list. Nothing but themselves. They didn’t even bring the cheerfulness, happiness, optimism, that was so common in those first days, maybe that first week. Such things were ultimately too heavy to drag around for the long term, and the holdouts shed them, carrying instead the things that clung without much conscious effort: sadness, worry, resignation.