I have determined that, at least for the first week or two of this whole “write every day” double whammy project of mine, that I need to get out of the house more often. When I am home in the evenings, it is far too easy to be side-tracked by anything and everything – kittens playing around my feet, adult cats demanding attention and lap time, a new recipe I want to try, chores to be done, books to be read, and on and on. Last time I did Nanowrimo, I can’t recall if I ever actually went to any of the write-ins (or, for that matter, if there were even write-ins to attend in the first place), and normally I am not the sort of person who is comfortable showing up at a gathering of strangers. But the nice thing about doing it this month is that it’s a group of strangers who are all staring fixedly at their laptop screens, so social graces aren’t a requirement.

I went to a write-in tonight, at the same coffee shop in midtown where Good Day Sacramento came to film us. Luckily I recognized a few of the people there, both from Richard’s regular writers group, and from this year’s Nano kickoff party, which is good because coffee shops have this tendency to be filled with people determinedly poking at their laptops pretty much year round, so it’s not a guarantee that picking out the Nano people will be easy.

So tonight I attended my second write-in for the month, although I have to confess that I showed up late, because I started reading the latest Terry Pratchett book two mornings ago, and was tired of only getting five or ten minutes at a stretch to read, so had no other choice but to sit down as soon as I got home from work and finish it off in one go. See my earlier comment about how writing + me + staying home to do it has been failing so spectacularly in recent past.

Other than the writing, though, it’s been the usual sort of day. I had an eye check-up appointment this afternoon, which I completely flaked on because I made the mistake of relying on the Outlook calendar pop-up reminders – except that lately my pop-up reminders at work no longer grab the focus, but instead will sit there behind all my active windows until I notice that there’s a little flashing box on the task bar at the bottom of the screen. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I do not make it a happy of obsessively monitoring my task bar, so my pop-up reminders tend to languish, ignored, sometimes for hours at a time. Luckily they were very understanding and rescheduled me for later in the day. Now all I have to do is remember to go get allergy shots at some point this week and I’ll be all set.

Nanowrimo progress report: 5,691 words. Despite getting a late start to the write-in, I’m still keeping up. Phew.