Those of you who are almost there: Go, go, go. Write, write, write. Thanks for the encouragement. I had fun even though I will not make the 50,000 words by midnight.

Pick up a magazine, find the five glossiest, eye-catching ads and have a character walk through an art gallery. Turn on a radio and have them relive some poignant, humorous or vivid episode from their youth. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

51K today, achieved while waiting for my car's windows to get replaced and alternately drowsing and sitting in a molded (not moldy, mind you)-plastic lawn chair in a West Oakland fender/glass auto body shop's lobby. The scent of glue-gun solvent, the sounds of glass crunching underfoot and the open door letting the breeze whip through and around you: all of these things were particularly powerful triggers to write. (Not that I'd recommend them, you understand.)

I had a tape recorder with me Sept. 10 while my wife and I waited in that very Las Vegas airport for our overnight flight to New York. Bored out of my skull with listening to MP3s, I turned on the recorder and pointed it around for a few minutes.

The resulting tape is full of the sounds of slot machines bonging and ringing loudly, passengers whining about the lateness of our plane and nearby footfalls paddding across the ugly carpet near our plane's gate. It's an odd little artifact of audio collage, and until last night (thumbing through the depths of my bike messenger bag and uncovering the Walkman I had listened to it on once) I had completely forgotten about its existence.

The long pause, the silence sounds like guilt to me. I've been exploring the pleasures of doing other things while the little voice in the back of my head says "You should be writing." The words are trickling slowly onto the page when I chose to focus, and I've had a great month socially. I'm going to have to establish more deadlines to ignore.