Halloween Snow Weekend Continued

So last night our phone went out.

And of course, with the phone went the DSL.

Verizon tells us they will be happy to send a service tech out November 9th.

*!*

So here I am, at my parents' house, checking my email and taking care of all my other online business.  We lost phone service for a week during the last big storm, and I didn't have a smart phone then, so this time should be a bit easier. 

But still.

NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo start in 2 days.  Granted, I don't need internet to work on NaNoWriMo.  As a matter of fact, the distraction might be a hinderance.  NaBloPoMo is another story, but there are opportunities to sign up for that every month now, so it's not as big a deal.  I guess I can blog about how badly NaNoWriMo is going from my phone or my parents' for the first part of November if I really want to do that.

Which begs the question, "Why am I doing this again?"  Every year I try, and every year I crash and burn at the Write-A-Novel-In-A-Month challenge. 

It's probably something to do with the mentality I learned doing martial arts: as long as I keep showing up and doing my best, whatever my best might look like on that particular day, I'm going to improve more than if I had just stayed at home.  You can apply that same philosophy to pretty much everything - maybe it goes for writing too.  God knows I spend enough time writing every day, whether the end result is something I publish or something I leave as a draft.  Being comfortable with the fact that first drafts, especially ones thrown down in 30 days, are supposed to suck, is part of the challenge, part of the fun. 

It's an exercise in muzzling my Inner Editor and other Critical Voices and just running around barefoot in my imagination, allowing myself to totally suck - and still feeling good about who I am and the fact that I keep showing up to give it my best shot.

It's therapy for a brain that spent decades being paralyzed by perfectionism, being far too self-critical and sensitive to the disapproval of others.

Screw it all, I say.

I love my sucky writing, and I love that once a year I can attempt to churn out vast quantities of it for an entire month.

Curling up tonight with my copy of No Plot? No Problem! and a big goofy grin on my face.

:-)