Yesterday I called it a night at 15,000 words cumulative total. I don’t remember how many of them I wrote yesterday but it was a lot. This I know because my body told me so and all the classic signs of fatigue made an appearance.
Here’s an exchange I had with my oldest son last night as I toiled in my third or fourth hour.
“Mom, I need tape,” he announced standing beside me at the desk I’ve staked my claim to for the next month.
“What kind of tape?” I snapped, irritated with the interruption. My characters were having a big row and it had rubbed off on me.
“Whaat,” he said in that deliberately dull way that only teenagers can pull off. No, strike that. They can’t pull it off, hence the elevation in my irritation.
“Scotch tape, masking tape, first aid tape, video tape, audio cassette tape, eight track tape…what, what, what?” I snarled like a tiger ready to eat her young.
He looked at me and blinked. Okay, so maybe he didn’t know what some of those kinds of tapes were.
“Sticky tape.”
“AAAAHHH!”
“Scotch tape.”
“You mean like we keep here?” I asked opening the upper right cabinet door of the desk not more than eight inches in front of him, hoping he’d put it back the last time he’d used it.
“Yep! Thanks.” He loped off.
I still had another thousand words to go because I was bound and determined to hit 15k before my head hit my pillow.
My husband returned from a business dinner, clearly in the mood to chat. He plopped his big frame in the easy chair next to the desk and sighed.
Please don’t want to talk, please don’t want to talk, please go watch television.
But I didn’t say any of that. I listened patiently to his dinner story and then he said, “I’m tired. Are you going to watch television?”
“Yes but I have another thousand words to go. I’ll be down when I’m done.”
Miraculously he left without another word or without looking hurt that I’d packed him off.
When I got to my goal and updated all my word meters, I shut down the computer and went downstairs. I don’t remember what hubby was watching. He doesn’t either because he was asleep in his chair. I plopped down on the loveseat and stretched out. It felt nice…for the five minutes that my conscious self registered it.
At ten o’clock he woke me and we trudged off to bed. I looked wistfully at my computer as I passed it…maybe another five hundred words?? Then I turned and looked inside my bedroom, where my eggplant-colored flannel sheets from Lands’ End (because they really do make the best sheets) sang to me like a Siren. The sheets won…but my characters weren’t sleepy and they decided to fool around a bit. I fell asleep before my voyeuristic mind could even get to the naughty bits, which was too bad because I need the material for a few chapters from now. Oy! This NaNo stuff is hard work.
