Last night as I hobbled past the 40,000 word mark, I asked myself how this was going, this sprint toward the last day of November in my first ever attempt at National Novel Writing Month. What was I learning about this crazy form of torture we’ve chosen to participate in, about the rhythms I fall into naturally as a writer, about what makes me walk away from it, what makes me keep my butt in the chair? My brain was in a state not dissimilar to the soup I was slurping for supper, my body as limp as if I'd run a 10k then been thrown around by an insane Thai massage therapist.

A few days before, Livia, one of the Chicago liaisons, and I had agreed to become one another's "nemesis," a personal challenge partner in NaNoWriMo parlance, and she challenged me to reach 50,000 words by Tuesday midnight. We were both coming up on 30,000 words then. "That's 5,000 words a day for the next four days," she said. "Can you do it?" 

So here’s one thing I've learned: that an inability to say 'no' is perhaps the sneakiest form of vanity. Over the next two days I met the 5000 word mark, most of the time by keeping my butt in the chair when the angel of my lesser nature was murmuring 'Go downstairs and make yourself an enormous hoagie, the kind with lots of layers; and you'll have to go to the store and buy some avocados, maybe some of that turkey pastrami they have at Stanley's—beautiful ingredients are required for a really beautiful sandwich; and while you're out, maybe seek out some new bedroom slippers—look at what you're wearing! those things would make a skunk pass out with one sniff ...' You get the drift. I wrote through really hard stuff, because I could see Livia's face in front of me, grinning at Wednesday morning's Lincoln Park Write-in with her 50,000 words of ingenious steam punk. The thought of me sheepishly shuffling into the coffee shop in my stinky bedroom slippers kept my fingers moving.

The other thing I learned is that what stops me most is the fear of writing something really, really bad. I’m talking make-your-eyes-burn bad. Make-distant-relatives-writhe-in-shame bad and Professor X-harping-from-his-coffin-that-for-godsake-you-better-hit-the-delete-key bad. No matter how much I adore Anne Lamott’s advice to let yourself freely write a shitty first draft, every time I sit down I have to tell myself that not a single word is etched in stone. In fact people don’t even etch words in stone anymore. Not even Professor X’s name is etched in stone, but molded into a flat bronze marker that makes some pimply-faced high school kid’s life easier every summer as he goes happily mowing over Professor X’s grave, which I’m always meaning to visit but never have. I’ve learned that if there is a digressive path to be taken, I will take it, as demonstrated by the preceding sentence. Nothing makes for easier not-writing than writing digressions. If there’s a fork in the road, take it, I always say.

Yesterday I learned that my twelve years with Catholic nuns at times weigh more than all the years that have passed since. That writing an erotic passage makes me glance over my shoulder the same way my friends and I did in fourth grade when we were looking up words like ‘vagina’ in the fat dictionary at the back of the classroom. The last time I needed an erotic passage I had to recruit Anais Nin to do it for me, making my character read a tract from “The Delta of Venus.”

There are some other things I’ve figured out at this halfway point through NaNoWriMo. But you’ll have to excuse me. It’s 9:44 in the morning, and I have 5,000 words to write before midnight.