NaNoWhineMo

I'm so far behind now, I feel like throwing my hands up. I'm only about one quarter of the way to the goal on the night before the halfway mark should have been met. I'm closing in on 13,000 but should be closing in on 25,000. Which means I need to average 1.5 times the 1667 words per day pace for the last 16 days. And that is not looking doable from where I sit right now. We're talking a daily pace of 2500 words per day. It isn't outside the realm of possibility but so unlikely I am feeling really discouraged.

I should be feeling rather pleased with myself though because today I made nearly 2000 words. But because I was aiming for 3500. And I had a fairly good chance of reaching it too because I made 1500 in 90 minutes this morning. I took a necessary break after that frantic push, intending to get right back to work but when I got back to my computer it was not cooperating with me. I though maybe I'd finally pushed the envelope to far with too many aps and windows open. But it turned out that my laptop had been commandeered by the update manager. My attempt to get back to work was met with frustration after frustration. Moving from window to window became exercises in meditation on the spinning hourglass against whited out windows. I was nervous that I was going to have to force a restart but I couldn't remember if I had saved my work before walking away from the computer.

Then the computer announces to me that updates had been downloaded and a restart was necessary to complete installation and the computer would restart automatically in 4:55; 4:48; 4:32.. The buttons gave me the option of: Restart Now and Restart Later. I clicked later and started saving my work and closing the applications. The dang alert came back every five minutes. That whole process took me longer than pumping out those 1500 words. I was so mad. Why today? Why in the middle of most peoples prime work hours. I fumed and ranted in my head during the whole procedure. If only I could have been typing those thoughts. I'd have had a much more interesting post than this.

Really, I don't get this proprietary attitude of programmers over a product that is no longer in their possession. I mean, it feels like a kind of theft to me. It steals my time and productivity. It commandeers the major tool with which I work right in the middle of a work session in which I am on a roll! How many employers would put up with the technology in the workplace if this was done to the computers of the average cubicle worker? I mean, REALLY!!!

And of course getting all worked up about it served no purpose other than to take my focus off my story and onto a frustration in which my obsessive-compulsive mind just glories in wallowing. By the time I the laptop got back to the welcome screen and I was able to click onto my desktop, I was exhausted. It takes another ten to fifteen minutes just to load my desktop. It was after noon by now and I'd been awake since six-thirty on less than seven hours of sleep after being awake for twenty hours on Tuesday--2AM to 10PM during which I advanced over 2000 words. I was tired of sitting on the edge of the bed watching a screen which I could do nothing with. I was just plain tired. So I lay down.

I was contemplating going ahead and making the walk to the library again this week even though neither me nor Ed needed any more books to see us through another week. I just wanted to get out of this room! I was going over in my mind the things I needed to do to get ready to leave. The next thing I knew I was opening my eyes in a dark room and it was 5:06. I was disgusted with myself and my mood has not improved in the last six hours.