The rain has now turned our beautiful but wet, Westcoast into a horror landscape of floods, mudslides, power outages, evacuation orders, and stranded people. If I wrote the details in a book, no one would believe them. They would put it in the post-apoc section of the store on the bottom shelf. My heart goes out to all the people feeling the negative effects of Mother Nature’s wrath.

A note to the hundreds of people stranded in their cars on the highway between two mudslides, with a raging river on one side of them and a rock cliff on the other, my heart goes out to you and I wish you a speedy recovery. I hope you have a good book to read.

Pep Talk from Jim Butcher

I love this one. His humor is so perfect.

Beware, sweet, innocent, aspiring writer. People aren’t telling you this, and they should be. NaNoWriMo participants are being deceived into thinking that being an author is a good thing. But you don’t know. You don’t know the horrors you might face as a professional, published, full-time author.

I could tell you. I could go on for hours about all the things that threaten my peace of mind. I could for you a tale unfold that would harrow up your carpal tunnels and chill the very marrow of your finger bones: tales of the constant questions, the unending deadlines, the mind-bending task of deciding each and every day which hours you will spend writing.

But never mind all of that. Best not to dwell on the worst. Instead, let us concentrate on what you must do to avoid this horrible fate, and save yourself agonies untold.

First and foremost, and I cannot stress this enough: do not sit down at the keyboard and write on a regular basis. This is a trap. You can tell yourself that you’re only doing it to scratch an itch, that you only need to get a few hundred words written and then you can set it aside—but the siren clickclickabulation of the dancing keys will do more than merely produce words on a page. It will condition you to want, nay, to need to do it each and every day.

… Finally, I can only encourage each and every aspiring author out there to quit writing at the first opportunity and never look back. This seemingly harmless activity is anything but, and if you cannot break its hold on you, if you continue to make up one excuse after another to keep typing, if you find yourself promising yourself “just one more novel” and never draw away from it, you will inevitably be drawn into published perdition.

All you need do is quit! Just say no! And you will be saved! But if you continue, and continue, and continue despite all the sane voices trying to sway you, you will be drawn into the maelstrom of madness that is the life of a professional writer.

Dear NaNoWriMo participant, I beg of you, listen to me! You cannot know the horrors you will face! Run! Flee! Turn aside from this dark road!

For if you do not, I fear that one day, you will find yourself writing with other damned souls like me.

Jim Butcher, 2014, from the Nanowrimo website

Sprint 1

Living room, 30 minutest = 638 words

Sprint 2

Office, 30 minutes late afternoon = 660 words

Total Wordcount for the Day

1,298

Total Wordcount

27,037

Reflections

1. It’s really hard to write when you’re glued to your devices to learn about road closures and stranded people. I’m pretty good at keeping myself focused, but today I couldn’t manage it. Extreme weather events are hard to ignore.