After a weekend (and Monday) of taking care of other people’s problems, I tried to hit the ground running on Tuesday. I hit the ground alright – straight into an inconveniently-located telephone pole, and fell, staring up at the stars, wondering why I had only written four hundred-odd words.

NaNo organizers claim that Week Two is the hardest by far, where you hit the middle of your manuscript and start figuring out where you went wrong. They also claim that doing NaNo correctly means saying no to all those pesky social demands that haunt you the rest of the year. Well, first, social demands don’t stop just because you get serious about your writing – I did say no to social stuff Monday night and managed to write (and lose) 1100 words. Yes, I do mean lose. The computer cut off for no reason and I couldn’t manage to recover the document. Grrr. The rest of the time, I’ve had to deal with other people’s crises in the hopes that one day when I have a crisis someone will show up for me. So I show up, I bring food, I drive to the doctors’, and occasionally I grumble in the hopes all of this will go away. It doesn’t.

But just because life gets full doesn’t mean you get to shortchange things that are important to you – and NaNo, and specifically my neglected Momentum project, is important to me. So, rather than whining about a difficult day, I got up yesterday and told myself I was going to write 3000 words. At times during my writing hours I felt I was rolling a wet ball of rubber cement up a steep grassy hill – the kind of situation where you want to leave more than anything. But I stuck to it. And I wrote 3400 words. (Yay me!) Today I hit the keyboard again, holding the whip over myself, and wrote 2902 – more than close enough.

Now, if I can only throw out 4,000 words tomorrow, I’ll still be behind the clock – but better. Having had the confidence and strength to push through, to know I can do this in a whole new way. Week Two will not have conquered. And anything I can manage to do this weekend around more social obligations (sister moving, etc.) will be gravy – I’ll stand only a few thousand words from the halfway mark, right on schedule.

Take that, world.