Day Seven. Time for a bumper sticker that reads:  

I survived one week of NaNoWriMo!

I've found out something surprising, though, in the course of this week. If I go off to work, having maybe written two hundred words (or none, like today), and I'm gone for ten hours or so, and I come back thinking omigod I have to write 2,000 words tonight and I DON'T WANT TO! and I just want to eat and turn on the television and veg out, and I don't - I mean, I do eat, and I may even turn on the television (or the radio, or YouTube) for background noise - but I don't just do that - I also sit down to write - if all that happens, then a couple of hours later, I realize that I have in fact written two thousand words, and I did not die. In fact, there were moments when I forgot about the word count and simply enjoyed the moments. How about that?

Tonight, for example, I came home thinking that I had nothing in me. Nothing at all. I could barely be civil to my husband, and he hadn't done anything wrong. He was just another human being, and I had to speak to him, and that was, at least at that moment, a herculean task. I made small talk for a few minutes, ate some dinner, and then opened my netbook and started to write.  I stopped  a few minutes ago, with 2,234 words added to my count.

It seems I may be able to meet some more NaNoWriters tomorrow at The Vault, if we can agree on a time. I hope that works out. In a write-in situation, I bet I could put 3,000 words on. This is the night when I get to read the Week 2 pep talk in No Plot? No Problem! It's going to warn me that I'm coming to the Slough of Despond for real, this time. Oddly, I feel rather optimistic about this week.