Move along, nothing to read here . . .

The past several days I have been waking up without apparent cause between 4:30 and 5 in the morning. It does not seem to matter when I go to sleep: sometimes early, sometimes late. Some of you already know that this is usually a more likely time for me to be falling asleep than to be waking up.

Last night, I tried to reset whatever mechanism it is that governs this sort of thing by staying up until 3:30 or so. It was partially successful. I woke up at 6 instead.

My next writing endeavor (and the one after that) is actually going to require about the same level of productivity as NaNo, I discovered when I did some calculations. Because each one is required to be much longer than the NaNo piece, and I have a month and a half set aside for each of them. This may prove to be unrealistic, although most of the writing for NaNo was done in chunks of two to three hours a day: a pace I should be able to maintain while working if I budget my time carefully, and maybe spend one day a week doing nothing else should I start to fall behind.

I just want to make sure I get these out in rough draft, so I can refine them and maybe have a workable draft of one of them (and a few short stories) in time to begin year two of my five-year plan (which starts in July), in which I start trying to get things published, get an agent, etc.

I'm a little dismayed that so many of the people I know seem surprised that I'm actually doing what I said I would do. Seems like some of them should have figured out by now that while I do cry wolf a fair amount, when I get truly passionate about something, I stay pretty focused until either the passion fades or I accomplish what I set out to. They all seem happy for me, though, so it's all good.

Got this cartoon via email yesterday. I don't get it. Surely it isn't a veiled attempt to try to get me to stop writing posts like this one. No, no. Surely not.

I find I am actually looking forward to having some work to do next week. It'll be nice to feel productive outside of my blog and NaNo, and I could certainly use some money right about now.