Yeesh.

Monday night I was idly wondering if I was close enough to cheat until I added up how many times I'd have to copy what I'd already written and paste it in again to win, and gave up.

My excuses this year? I was caught up just before my Save Hiatus buddy Adam Levermore showed up to stay for four days so we could attend the STS-129 Shuttle Atlantis launch Tweetup at the Kennedy Space Center, which was an amazing experience.

Plus I had to show him around a few spots in Daytona (OK, one spot) (OK, the speedway) and then I figured it would be rude to ignore him while I wrote even though a) I knew he wouldn't mind and b) at least one evening he was busy ignoring me to write his own stuff. But hey, there was a guest in the house.

Then after he left I had just a few days before Teresa would be leaving for a week-long trip to NYC so that time was precious and I knew I'd have a whole week to myself to write. No problem! Plus I had a lot of shuttle photos to work up and stuff.

That week was spent dealing with errands, dinners, coordinating rides, IMing to Teresa, and reconstructing the contents of my iPod Touch after my iTunes library lapsed into a persistent vegetative state and forgot that I had any apps. All vitally important.

Then Teres came back, and joyous time was spent catching up with her.

And and and… (Coincidentally, my excuses for not working out for three weeks are strikingly similar to these)

Actually I did do a fair amount of writing, in my Flickr descriptions and e-mails and forum posts and articles and Twitter tweets. The problem wasn't getting me in front of a keyboard, it was getting me to write my novel, and looking at it now I still don't get an urge to work on it (although I did think of stuff I wanted to put into a previous unfinished NaNo novel). Which means that a) my novel idea isn't thrilling me, and b) I'm not enough of a novelist to write it anyway and make it thrilling. So this one goes on the shelf.

However, to get myself back into the habit of writing I'm lowering my bar a bit and leaping into Hollidailies, where I commit to posting at least one blog post a day for a month, Dec. 7 to Jan. 6, 2010.  Instead of 1,667 words a day I need only produce 50, and I think I can blather that long, so be prepared for at least a steady trickle of brain leakage.

Hmm. Maybe I can write my novel in 50-word bursts…