Some Writing About Not Writing

Busy.  Crazy.  Why don't we hyphenate the two?  Busy-Crazy.  That's how things get this time of the year when you're a teacher.  The freshman papers roll in thick and fast, as do the meetings and the student conferences.

Add in some book signings and readings in far-flung locales:

The calm before the storm

They're an awful lot of fun.  And they're an excuse not to clean my house....which is a good thing.  Until the dust bunnies rise up and take over.

Recycled Art Dust Bunnies by Suzanne Proulx

I'm okay with not cleaning.  I can live with those life-sized dust bunnies.  What's hard is the other thing I'm not getting done: writing.  

A writer who isn't writing tends to get cranky or downright depressed, and I'm no exception.  Stray ideas for the book I'm theoretically working on--the one I've been working on more theoretically than actually for months now--ping around in my head at inopportune times.  I list them in Word documents about which I promptly forget.

As the weeks wear on, I start to have more ideas for books and random writing projects, and before long I'm filled with doubt.  Should I abandon project A and start project B?  Or should I be not-writing them both simultaneously?

Meanwhile the achingly beautiful fall days tick by and November approaches, bringing with it NaNoWriMo, that time of year when people challenge each other to draft that novel they've long been intending to write in thirty-one frenzied days.  

Maybe we could all just agree to move NaNoWriMo to June this year?  

To those intrepid souls who have done NaNoWriMo: Did you walk away from November with a workable rough draft, or was one month not enough time?  How did you manage to fit all that writing around your daily life?  And exactly how much coffee did you have to drink to make it happen?