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.

Thanks Liz. I finished my quota for the day and enjoyed the comments all around. Only scary thing from the trip home: I was walking west on Monument, minding my own business on the sidewalk, contemplating the night when I was startled by a dog, sounded big, barking at me. It was a police dog hanging out the back window of a sqad car headed east. I must look like a drug courier or some other suspicious character. Maybe a jewel thief ...

Writers on Writing, graciously hosted by Liz Tascio

(photos)

1 | 2 | 3 | 4
5 | 6 | 7

(soundtrack)

"Counting Crows' "August and Everything After," Portishead's title album and Soul Coughing's "Ruby Vroom" -- except for the song about the plane being driven into the Chrysler Building

(quotes)

Tyler: I just spent a few hundred words describing how my character gets a rake out of a shed.
Karen: What color is the rake?

Karen: Relevance, what is that? So many sidetracked little jaunts. It'll be funny.

Matt: Like I'm looking at this and this is not a complete sentence, there are a lot of fragments.

Tyler: (on his characters) God, this is boring.
Liz: Age them!

Matt: We're not writing critiques of the novel, we're writing the novel.

Liz: It does seem like a lot of effort to put into it for nothing. I'm totally obsessed with word count. Nothing else matters!

Tyler: Is "exasperatingly" a word?
George: *nods head vigorously*
Liz: I think you should break it up ...
Tyler: (writes) ... "In an exasperating manner."

4,000 plus words on my two days off. It is possible to catch up at least a little bit in my days off. I'm planning a fancy dinner party with lots of details and exciting bits between the guests. Hope it will kill many pages of words.

12:30 a.m. Beer No. 2. Watched TV.Cleaned my room (sort of). Procrastination time is over. I have a pen, paper and inspiration from Karen's prodigious output. Let's write!

Don't hold out on us, Tyler: Fewer chases, more climaxes.