Over at the SEx blog, I started something I feel compelled to continue. Unlike everyone else, who’s ready to share all the great holiday memories, and how much they love the holidays, I’m providing a haven for Grinches everywhere. There are all sorts of reasons to suffer through the holidays, and if you’ve ever felt like giving someone an eggnog enema when they tell you to have a great holiday, I’m your gal.

Seasonal greetings themselves have become a battleground. I have heard Ann Coulter being quoted as saying she enjoys wishing people a Merry Christmas because it’s like saying a little “Fuck you” to people who don’t celebrate Christmas. Now I have several reasons to loathe Ann Coulter besides this one, but since it’s seasonally appropriate, it’s a great reason to not be able to stand her for the months of October, November, and December. Coulter’s reasoning makes me think of a dorm-mate I had in college, whose deep West Virginia accent (although since we were attending West Virginia University at the time, I was the one with the accent) made her holiday greeting of choice sound like “Merry Kiss-my-ass,” which I loved and promptly stole from her. So Jessie, wherever you are, bottoms up for that one. But apparently, not wishing someone a Merry Kiss-my-ass means that you’re a terrorist. Bill O’Reilly even claims there’s a War on Christmas (TM).

When was the last time Bill O’Reilly went to a mall? Hell yeah, there’s a War on Christmas (TM). It’s on all the days leading up to Christmas, too, starting from Black Friday. The battlefields are in malls and shopping centers, and being waged by guerrilla troops, who cruise slowly up and down the rows of parked cars, stalking shoppers laden with bags and going the appropriate direction away from the center of commerce.

These automotive vultures drift in and out of the normal shopping traffic, turn signals flickering madly and incessantly as they creep by, hoping for the Big Score–the first parking space after the handicapped spaces. As elusive as the dream of the perfect orgasm, they nevertheless pursue it, edging their way in front of the people who are just trying to get through the damn parking lot to the spaces way out in BuFu just so we can engage in a simple exercise of basic provisioning (I needed a new bra, and JCPenney has those nice old ladies who will measure you). Yet even in BuFuland, the slots are scarce and the vultures are circling. I spotted a slot and headed for it, only to be stalled by a woman who chose to shake her pop-up stroller out in the middle of the lane. Ordinarily, I don’t feel much irritation at these folk–I tied my children to my torso when malling when they were light enough and small enough to stay put–now I make them walk–so I have sympathy with someone who needs to wrangle kids in the Toylands of Consumption. But you can bet I went into combat mode when the woman finally got kit and caboodle situated only to stop in her tracks and wave ahead the person coming from the opposite direction, who swung conveniently and tidily into the spot I’d been eyeing, and lurking, and waiting patiently to access many long moments ago.

It was then I decided that The Girls would have to be happy with sports bras and swinging free like Tarzan for another few weeks. I gunned the gas and with a cheery wave, mouthed a hearty and very clear, “Fuck you” to the couple getting out of the car.

It’s just my little coded way of saying, “Merry Christmas.”

Well…it’s December 1st. I’m no longer chained to my NaNo WIP, and no longer on the hook for 50,000 words in 30 days.

Bet you’re wondering how I did? Ahh…I didn’t think so. But I’ll tell ya anyway. Last night, around midnight, I clocked in at 30,077 words. Considerably less than I hoped for, but hella more than I expected. Having a week of null-computer time cut me deeply–not having my familiar setup made me just a little compulsively nutty. Adding a 14-hr round trip roadtrip over Thanksgiving probably didn’t help, either. I took my laptop, thinking (somewhat foolishly) that family time with the kids in tow meant I could sneak away and get some work done. I should have known that Mr. Xandra is consummately better at sneaking away from family than I am. Of course, he did most of the driving, so I could hardly begrudge him a nap. I may be mean, but I’m not totally heartless.

But every year I participate in NaNoWriMo (and this will make my fourth year now), I learn something new about my writing process. NaNos, BIAWs (Book In A Week, with no word count goal, simply a week where every waking moment you can spare is spent writing new materials), goal-setting challenges (a big shout-out to my local RWA chapter, which runs a goals list that’s incredibly supportive and has come in very handy for me–our list mistress, Jennette Powell, deserves a huge cheer because she has a gift for knowing when to push and the right thing to say to encourage us to keep forging ahead), they all teach me just a little more about my writing process and its constant evolution. Last year’s NaNo taught me that I could make serious progress in world building if I just let my imagination go and not worry about whether or not it fit into the story. As a result, I have a story with a rich world and even if much of the material never makes it into the finished product, it’s still there, and making the world more real to me, and hopefully more real to the readers as well. This year, I learned something that I suspected prior to November’s efforts–if I don’t have a beginning, I’m not going anywhere. I spent about 20,000 words in set-up. It was useful–most of it, anyway, as it has given me possible glimpses into the lives of the characters prior to the inciting incident. But it took me about 23,000 words to come up with a convincing beginning to the story. I got so sick of trying to push my characters together that once I got an inciting incident (and it by no means is a great one, but that’s what this POS…er, Discovery draft–is), I jumped ahead and had to work on something else. The ending. From the ending, I finally figured out what the story should be. So now I can get the characters into a story that will fit them, and fit the ending I’ve written for them.

But not, I think, today. It’s funny, but the WIP I’d been working on up until then (my pet WIP), I’d just started getting into the next level with it when NaNo came up and I had to put it aside (the rules of NaNo say that you have to start on something new and try to write through to the end of the story, the idea being that you have a 50,000 word story framework that you can edit and revise at a later date). Periodically during the month, I’ve had the strongest urges to get this WIP going again, but had to control them in favor of building up word count for the NaNo. Free of that, I can now return to my blond hunk of a telepath who can read the minds of women everywhere–their most secret desires, their most passionate longings…

Okay, so what am I still doing here?