The third time was not the charm for me, at least as it it pertains to National Novel Writing Month. I started out pretty good, keeping my word count around the daily average, for the first five days. Then I became ill. Nothing serious, just a massive head cold, with a sinus infection chaser. Persistent cough from the drainage. That led to the onset of bronchitis. All of this kept me up most of the night on Wednesday/early Thursday of the 7th and 8th. It really sucked away a lot of my motivation, because I was just so tired all the freaking time. Then I began making excuses to not write during times when I wasn't tired. Like deciding the afternoon of Friday the 9th that now was a good time to begin a massive purge of all magazines in my study. (Anything more than a year old, with some notable exceptions, went to the recycle bin.) I do have more legroom under my desk now, so one could rationalize that this actually assists in the writing process. Yeah, that sounds good. In the end, though, I excused myself right out of getting anywhere past 6,000 words. It's December 1st, and I'm still not 100%, but I'm well enough that I should be writing, writing, writing. And I will. Because writers write. I have some great ideas regarding this novel I started, and the overall plot is pretty well laid out in my head. (This is a rarirty for me, as nearly all of the novels I've begun, NaNoWriMo-related or not, have hardly ever been fully-formed, at least in terms of a basic plot.) I'm going to keep at this one. It may turn in to the sort of project Jason Snell undertook, where instead of starting a new novel for this year's NaNoWriMo, he added 50,000 words to one he already had underway. We'll see.