Multitasking and NaNoWriMo

NPR's Morning Edition is doing an excellent series about multitasking.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95702512

I love stuff like this because it makes me sound less like a know-it-all-douche-nozzle when I'm trying to explain to folks that using a hands free don't mean a darn thing.

Every job I've had in Washington State has come with a significant about of road time so I've come to understand the hazards of multitasking while driving... but I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing.

So far, I've written four short stories, taken one novel to the 16K word mark and started another one that has about 15K words logged. The second one occupies most of my time these days. It's hard, because ideas for short stories come and go. Then, there's NaNoWriMo on the horizon.

November is National Novel Writing Month if you hadn't heard. The goal: To produce a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month the winner gets a... seriously, what more do you need? I think a 50,000 word finished novel (1st draft obviously) is not a bad little prize for an aspiring novelist. It's a start anyway.

Well, I'm intrigued and inspired. Ideas are cheap, I think most would agree it's the execution that you pay for. I fell into an idea recently while we were celebrating my Mother-In-Laws birthday a few Sundays back. My wife, Mother and Father-In-Law, Sister-In-Law, and a family friend, were seated around the dining room table in the middle of a heated discussion about something or other (isn't that how these things always go?) and the friend's phone rang. It was in her jacket, which hung on a hook by the door. She excused herself from the table, walked over to the jacket, took the phone out and looked at the number then muted the ringer and came back to the conversation without missing a beat.

And an idea jumped into my head: What if she answered it and... well I'm not going to tell you the rest.

When my wife and I left that night, I'd lined out the bare skeleton of a plot. The next morning I jotted it all down and when I came home from work later that day, I wrote the opening line. I was giddy.

Well, my excitement was tempered by the fact that I'm still muddling through the sludgy bits of novel #2. I really want to finish it, more than anything in life! At the pace I write there's no way that will happen before November.

I'd also like to participate in NaNo and set my keyboard on fire typing fast and furious, never looking back, not even stopping to blink. I feel like it'd be a betrayal to suspend my current work for this one, however the challenge looms before me and it's to big to ignore.

What to do, what to do?

No matter what I choose, I've learned that I can not write with outside distractions even though I'm decent at multitasking. That means no music or NPR while I stare at the monitor and use the thesaurus on glamorous words like "went".

Seventeen days to decide; I suspect that my mind is already made up and I just don't know it yet.