30 Days of NaNoWriMo – Day 2: Baby Steps

Where I Wrote: A Barnes & Noble Cafe in the Bronx.

How I Feel About What I Wrote: Aside from not getting enough done, I actually feel great about what I wrote.

The Mood I Brought to the Table: Really good.

The Experience: Well, today was absolutely a collection of lessons.

Lesson 1: I’m fine with rejection letters at this point. Literally the first thing I did after rolling out of bed was find a brand new rejection letter for “The Drowned God of the Silent Realm.” After the last two rejections, this one barely stung at all. Getting outside and heading to a random destination to work on Memory was enough to get a smile out of me again.

Lesson 2: However… it turns out that tablets really aren’t the best for writing outside. At the very least, Polaris Office just… absolutely loves to unexpectedly quit. With a short, unsatisfying apology too: “Unfortunately, Polaris Office stopped working,” it says, as if Polaris Office is shrugging it’s shoulders like, “What’s with that fucking program anyway? Pfft.” Like Polaris itself felt my sarcastic discontent when it shut itself down when I tried to write the sentence, “Not in the breath it took before lightning struck again,” for the sixth time. One thing’s for sure: Polaris Office didn’t understand my exhausted discontent when it shut down for the very first time, taking two pages of work with it.

So, ultimately, I had a good 20 minutes worth of writing, a solid 30 minutes of trying to figure out a way to continue writing without Polaris, and then, upon finding no work around, reading a bit more Alloy of Law and heading home.

When I got home, I started to investigate other apps to write with. But, of course, getting home presented another problem.

Lesson 3: Organizing your schedule with work and writing is just… really important. I’ve always known this, of course. I knew that going out to write would cut it close with work (I have a weekly quota of hours to put in, thus my settling for a writing location in the Bronx instead of heading to Manhattan, where I always want to write). What I somehow didn’t expect was that getting those last three hours would somehow take six hours of real time (it’s a strange, strange stay-at-home job). The solution: learning to roll out of bed, get directly into the shower, and leave home without trying (and repeatedly failing) to beat 6-3 in Dracula’s Curse (I will not get started about how much I love and equally hate Dracula’s Curse).

So, in the end, today was a single, long struggle to get a lot done with way too little time. I really, really wanted to put this post off until way later, finishing the scene I was working on outside, but that felt like cheating; I planned poorly and missed my writing goal by a huge margin.

But, at the same time, I learned a ton about being an active writer. Baby steps.