The Month of Living Dangerously

As you may know, November is National Novel Writing Month, the annual event where writers around the world attempt to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. (For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that comes out to 1667 words per day.) I attempted to do this last year and wound up adding a mere 13,000 words to my novel-in-progress. This year, with that same novel still under construction, I decided to do a slightly different take on NaNo, committing only to finishing this first draft, an effort I estimated at about 20,000 words. And, to give myself a fighting chance, I decided to clear my calendar of everything but work, school and unavoidable chores--laundry, nuking food and running the dishwasher. It's now the last weekend of the month and this is where I am: 1) Old Dog has washed 9 loads of his own laundry. 2) We've eaten through 90% of the leftovers in the freezer, including two containers of Mystery Meals (that remain mysteries to this day). 3) I've turned down: o 2 requests for babysitting. o 2 grandkids' birthday parties. o A plea to help out my sister (yeah, that one's totally coming back to haunt me) 4) The bathrooms are gross. 5) The dust is so thick you could write a NaNo novel in it. 6) Wads of dog hair the size of tumbleweeds roll across the floors. Balanced against all that is the fact that I've penned 11,000 words and I'm down to the last three scenes of the book. So I'm ahead of the game.