In not-plague times, I usually have a fluctuating number of friends and sisters visiting over Thanksgiving. Spouse and I prepare Thanksgiving for eleventy-billion people and then collapse in exhaustion. The Big Holiday Week is not conducive to writing 1,667 words a day and finishing a novel.
However, we live in plague times. No one is going to visit me. So I’m going to do NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. Am I going to write a novel? Hell no. I’m just going to write.
I know your next logical question. What are you going to write? I have no fucking idea. Current plan is one nice solid essay to submit to overly ambitious places. If I’m a week into this madness and the essay crumbles in my hands? Then I’ll try something else. The point is to write and push myself but not to die of an unholy combination of light deprivation, carpal tunnel, and malnutrition.
Anyone with me?
Fangs and Clause 
*sobs* Must I?
I’ve done it before. Even when I was teaching. I even managed 50k. Novels. I signed up again this year. Then I thought I wouldn’t. Now I think I might. Thank you?
All the cool kids are doing it, right Downith?
Phew. If the cool kids are doing it, that let’s me off the hook.
Nice try.
Dunno. Seems like an unnatural, inorganic process — to suddenly sit down and do something you haven’t been doing for weeks and months.
I’m making it organic. I have been in training since mid September to work an hour before work. I know it’s not 3 am, but it’s a start. And I’m not doing the 1667 words/day. I’m pretty sure most people make it through by peer pressure.