to updating this site: 1.) NaNoWriMo. 2.) Thanksgiving travel. 3.) Sickness, in the form of a lame little cold which nonetheless turned me into a gloomy snuffling rheumy-eye’d Dickens character for days and days. But now the dense cloud of ennui and Kleenex is dispersing and letting some of the twinkly holiday stuff sparkle through, and I think I might even be myself again one day soon.

I did not win NaNoWriMo. I did not get to 50,000 words, as I pretty much expected I wouldn’t. I guess I could have done it if I’d followed the some of the proverbial NaNoWriMo advice, i.e., cancel all your social obligations; order nothing but carryout; shut yourself up in your room with your hands taped to the keyboard and a beer hat filled with Red Bull, and so on. But for me, the point was more that I wanted to see how many words I could write every night while still being sort of a normal person who cooks dinner and watches those old Twin Peaks* episodes with her boyfriend (who had never seen the good episodes). And I wrote more words under those circumstances than I thought possible. All the counting counting counting made me twitchy, though, since I was working with several different files at once, instead of a long rambling Word document that starts with It-was-a-dark-and-stormy-bibbety-blah, and at some point I needed a calculator, and then I felt like I was auditing my own soul, but in the end it was nice to have some measure of progress. And then I ate some turkey.

*Comments we made over the course of viewing both seasons throughout November include, “That’s not the last you’ll see of creamed corn.” “It’s not very hard to kill a Renault brother, is it?” and “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Leland!”

Anyway, it’s close to midnight, and I seem to be needing a lot more sleep than usual, what with the cold and snow and shopping and minor ailment and my newfound taste for hot toddies, so I hope you’ll understand my cutting this short. I’ll be back in a few days to blather about Christmas music or something.