Well I might have mentioned that I enjoy writing. I just don't write for other people. The stories were always confined to my kids or myself. The boys enjoyed stories about these neighborhood boys who were normal everyday school kids by day, and time traveling superheroes on their free time. ACES was born and it's been fun even if I have written far fewer now then I used to.

So when I started hearing about NaNoWriMo I figured I would give it a shot. After all how hard can it be to write 50,000 words in a whole month right? I have thrown away stories nearly that long and they didn't take more than 10-15 days until I decided they weren't worth the paper they were written on. NaNoWriMo doesn't care if I think it's good or bad, all that matters is the quantity. So I figured this would be a shoe-in for me to manage. I was wrong.

First of all it has to be original. I have a tendency to use common characters in most of my stories (pure laziness I think). So I resolved that issue fairly quickly. Not too difficult to bring another few people to life in my mind. Just putting a face to those voices in my head (I'm kidding there aren't usually voices in my head). Then of course just start writing. something usually comes to me as I start putting a character into situations. Their immediate reactions to common situations is usally good for at least 10-12k. Not this time. My characters don't wanna do anything. They want to be difficult. They haven't decided if they want to get along with each other, or if they want to take this trip I have planned for them.

I thought being a parent had it's rough spots, but sometimes I feel like getting ideas out of my head and onto paper is far more difficult than talking my 8 year old into eating veggies. I don't seem nearly as strange to my kids when I argue with them about their eating habits, compared to arguing with myself about a storyline.

I've decided that maybe all I really need to do is have a couple of tasty beverages (code word for Jim Beam and soda) and maybe everything will start to sort of line out and become a bit more cohesive. If nothing else I figure I'll be a much happier failing writer.

Anybody else out there offering up their souls to the NaNoWriMo Gods? More importantly anybody else out there having similar difficulties? I'm sure that I'm not the only one. I looked on the site and saw there were tons of people in my area attempting this. Altough I have to admit looking at their word counts made me realize how far behind the curve I am at this point.

Well I guess I have procrastinated long enough, and I'm gonna head to the kitchen for one of those tasty beverages and hopefully some inspiration....