NaNoWriMo – day 3

I never fully realized how important the things we take for granted are – in this case, I’m talking about a place to call your own. Although I have awesome friends that keep passing me around like a black spot while being incredibly nice to me, feeding me, supporting me and so on, it’s not the same as having your own place. Just the sense of being able to close the door behind you and then noone has a right to come in. Or to leave things as they are, not to plan ahead for trivial stuff, like: do I wash my laundry here or do I pack it up and wash it tonight at my other friend’s place? Sleeping as well – can I stay up until two to write? If we’re sharing one room and the other person has to get up in the morning, then no. Doesn’t work. I guess what really gets me is that I’m not in control of my life. I’m dependent on others. And I don’t like that feeling.

What has all of this to do with writing? Very little, at first, except for the fact that it’s keeping me from it. Then again, it has everything to do with it. Just the fact that this is keeping me from writing is worrying. One of my dreams was always to be good enough to live from writing, because then I could travel, because “I can write from anywhere”. Ha. Apparently not. This is an extremely frustrating discovery, but also an important one: for me to be in a writing frame of mind, I need another frame – that of my own space, my privacy, my little tiny bit of the world where I can shut it out.

Story-wise nothing much happened, of course. Ally returned to the bookshop and had a conversation there and met some people, but I didn’t get to move it along much past that. On the NaNo website there’s a statistics page with every profile. It tells you all kinds of clever things. My favourite sentence is the following:

“At this rate you will be finished on: December 10, 2011”

Thanks for that.

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