NaNoWriMo: Panic sets in

There are seven days left in NaNoWriMo.   We are all close to our goals. 

But none of us have written more than a few words in the last two or three days.  One child is sick. I have a cut on a fingertip that makes typing painful and slow. And Thanksgiving is the day after tomorrow!  We have lost our momentum and it is not fun right now.  This is when we need it to be fun!

The thing that would make it fun is to have a cafe writing session.  We haven't done that yet and it would pump up the kids' enthusiasm.  They want so much to take their little  Danas into Starbucks or Panera Bread and look like writers.  (I will have to make do with pad and paper.)   We haven't had the time for it yet, and I'm not sure when to fit it in.

While the calendar says there are seven days left, I don't feel like there are. Wait!  The calendar says there are eight days left, since the deadline is 11:59 pm on November 30.  The NaNoWriMo site says seven days.  We actually plan to validate our word counts on Sunday. There are a couple of reasons I don't want to wait till Tuesday to do it.  One is the three-hour orthodontist appointment, wherein Eleanor will get her headgear, on Monday afternoon.  Nothing like an aching head and teeth to take away the fun of writing a book.  There's also my irrational fear of waiting till the last minute and having a sudden computer problem.   It could happen.  It probably won't, but my brain doesn't process probabilities well.  If there is a slight chance of something happening it, I want to plan for and avoid it.  So Sunday is our day. 

Which means our cafe writing session has to be... tomorrow.

Yes, I know we have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in there.  But what Friday is it?  No, I'm not going Black Friday shopping but half the county is and they need parking spaces too.  I've been thinking about our cafe options and all are either in shopping center/strip mall lots with... stores.  Or, they are in picturesque neighborhoods with... shops.  Shops.  And few parking spaces.  Saturday is usually pretty crazy too, in my experience.

(Why do I call some stores and some shops?  Barnes and Noble and Macy's are stores.  No Bare Walls (an art shop) and A Touch of the Old Country are shops.  Right?)

So tomorrow, on my biggest cooking day of the year, I will be taking a couple of hours to spend with my kids in a cafe writing our novels. We'll eat muffins and consume hot drinks and write, and it'll be festive and fun.  We'll get our word counts up and I will try not to think of the three corn casserole that I should be baking at that moment, or the bread I should be ripping up for stuffing.

(Why not today, you ask?  Today is already full.)

Yeah, we'll pull it off.  It'll be nerve-wracking for me.  I don't like cramming my days full of action.  But it'll be fun too.  Fun. That's what we need right now!