NaNoWriMo Check in #1 - The Evil of Distraction

The magic number is 8405. It sounds like a lot of words, but in a month of NaNoWriMo, when I am supposed to be writing 50,000 words, I am behind.  I should have been at over 10,000 words as of first thing this morning.  I'm supposed to average 1,667 words a day, and I'm not. If I keep up this pace, I'll finish on December 7.

Oops.

And there is a very good reason for my lack of verbiage.  There has been some busyness in my life, but I've still had time to write.  I thought the words would just flow, attempting to write a memoir.  After all, it's my life.  Certainly I can dredge up 50,000 words worth of - well, memory. Just write the facts, ma'am.

Not so fast.

I am continously wrestling with the "Internal editor", the part of me who wants to think about whether somethign is phrased right, and especially the part that wants to do fact checking.

Fact checking on the Internet, where five innocent minutes quickly turn into "one hour later", is not a good idea right now.  Ah, sweet distraction.  I should have been doing that in October.

At least, last year, writing fiction, I didn't have to worry about fact checking.

Here's a memory of Mr. Lazar, my 7th and 9th grade English teacher. He was one of the first to seriously encourage me to write. Hey, is he still alive?  Time to open Google and see.

What was the name of that hot dog stand on Fordham Road that I loved?  When did the Third Avenue El cease service and get torn down?

One advantage of growing up in New York City is that a lot of memories are available online.  The disadvantage is, a lot of memories are available online.

For example, I found one of my class pictures, and no, I'm not linking to it.

I found some interesting stuff (interesting to me, anyway).  I found a recent video on You Tube that shows a brief (very brief) clip of the housing project where I grew up. (Yes, I am going to show it to you - just not today.)  I confirmed that my housing project was, indeed, a goat farm before the project was built - just like my Mom and Dad had told me.  Imagine that - a goat farm in New York City, in the 1940's.

Here is a story of my neighborhood- to be more exact, a playground across the street.

You can see how addictive (and distracting) this is.

But now, back to work.  I have a chicken memoir to write!

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo?  If you are, how are you doing?

If you want to be my writing buddy, here I am.