NaNoWriMo Day Eight

Saturdays are not good writing days because of general busy-ness. I've determined to not try to write on Saturday - if it doesn' t happen, it's no big deal. So zero words added yesterday to my 12102.

Major resolution to a problem with our fourteen-year-old car yesterday. I've been feeling kind of loony because I've been convinced (due to evidence on the road where I park) that the car's been leaking something or other for a year now. Drips here and there. I guessed oil. The last three times I've taken it in for oil changes or whatevs, I've asked the guys to check for leaks; they couldn't find anything drippy at all. So I decided to live with the phantom leak, knowing that eventually, it would probably get way worse and all would become obvious. That day was yesterday.

Last week the car started smelling extra gassy. Super gassy, in fact.

Yesterday, on my way back from morning tai chi, I pulled into my spot, and there was a big puddle-o-something where the car had been sitting earlier. I looked behind me, and there was a trail, all the way down the street, and another big puddle where I had turned into the spot. I touched my fingers to the puddle and sniffed.

Gas.

Drove the car to the garage, two and a half clicks from our house, trailing gas all the way. We lost a quarter of a tank to the road - probably about 8 litres.

Cheap repair - $10 in parts.

I'll be extra nice to nature today to make up for drizzling gas all over the place.

A confession

With less than an hour to go to the start of this year's NaNoWriMo, I want to make a confession about my plot:

I tried to write this novel before. In fact, I tried to write in during NaNoWriMo '06.

I'm using NaNoWriMo to write it again for two reasons:

1) in '06 I didn't get very far. I wrote less than 15 pages, I think, before I quit.
2) I'd been thinking about this idea for quite some time, and in '06 it just came out wrong.

I was pretty angry then about where my life was going, and how little time I'd had to work creatively. Grad school doesn't leave you with a whole lot of free headspace. (If anyone tells you that doing a PhD is worth it, believe them. If they tell you you'll have loads of time to do creative work while you write your thesis, then they are dirty liars.) I was uptight and upset and those 15 pages of malformed book were hilarious and gross and pretty awesome in their own right, but they didn't do justice to the idea as I had originally envisioned it.

So I'm starting over. I've done more thinking, and more research. I've pared down my responsibilities. I've decided to spend a few months on creative work. I've been meditating and exercising and trying to like myself better and I've cleared away all the logistical obstacles I was able to. I'm ready to embrace this project fully: intellectually and emotionally and hell, even sexually and spiritually, if you want to get personal about it.

It's a new beginning.