preparation

NaNoWriMo preparation for me involves thinking about everything but my novel. Honestly, I've learned from experience that planning things out never works for me (for NaNo at least), and it's better to just start with a character or two (or a few) and perhaps a vague idea (optional).

I've been an ML for the past couple years, so preparing for that takes up some of my time (probably not as much as it should; I always put it off and then feel woefully unprepared when we start meeting).

No, my NaNo preparation mostly involves thinking about music, drinks, and food (not necessarily in that order).

Thinking about drinks involves hunting down new and delicious teas to try, pondering whether I should purchase celebratory reaching-50k champagne now and chance being tempted to use it for writing fuel at around 15k instead of any other alcoholic delights I'll have on hand, and trying to find my favorite chai recipe.

Thinking about music involves making playlists. Lots and lots of playlists that I inevitably end up not even listening to while I'm writing because I get sucked into obsessively listening to just one artist instead. One artist who is inevitably named Nick Cave.

And food is what I have been thinking about this week. I bought a few not-too-unhealthy snacks a couple days ago and will get some more at Uwajimaya and Trader Joe's before noveling commences. What I really need to do is find recipes for things I can make big batches of on the weekends and eat for a week. I've half-heartedly tried to do this in the past and then given up before the month is out which tends to lead to me just not eating while I'm doing NaNo or getting a bunch of take-out. Not ideal! So this year I'm going to stick with it. And I think I'll do better. I've gotten much better at cooking in the past year (perhaps the acquisition of this apron helped, or perhaps I'm just not so lazy). So. Recipes. I must find them.

It's hard to believe we're halfway through October already.