Planning time

Most people who know me would probably get a good laugh out of the thought that I'd be planning much of anything more than 5 minutes in advance - I'm a hopeless procrastinator and frankly tend to work better under pressure anyway.  However, that really only works for mental projects - term papers, for example (let's not talk about the time my printer decided to stop talking to my laptop at 4:30 AM, okay?).  When it comes to anything physical, twenty-odd years of playing stringed instruments and about a decade of off-and-on distance running have taught me that cramming just doesn't work.  The body is much slower than the brain - while I can memorize 20 Latin vocab words in a minute or three, it takes me weeks to add a couple of miles to my running stamina.  Oh, and then there's the whole I'm-broke-and-so-I'm-making-everyone's-holiday-presents thing I've been doing for the past few years - I may be able to design a pair of socks on my lunch break, but it can take a month to actually knit the darn things.

So, against my own inner nature and kicking and screaming all the way, I'm actually considering planning something else right now (it must be because I've finally turned the heel on the socks).  That would be a novel, of course, since hey, it's almost November and that means NaNoWriMo is coming!  Despite the fact that I've done four WriMos (and "won" three of  'em), I've never actually done one in November when everyone else does - Thanksgiving is my favourite holiday, and then once I picked up the bookstore job, well, holiday shopping hell, anyone?  So it's a busy month, to put it mildly.  But see, I got this idea...

But in order to have even the teeniest chance of pounding out 50,000 words amidst feasting, recital planning, Black Friday and any number of other distractions, I'm going to need a plan.  A good solid plan that doesn't have too many holes (rabbit, black or otherwise) for me to fall into and get lost down for untold aeons, but not so strict that I feel stifled by it and don't feel like I can take a tangent to Terceira if someone feels like going over there all of a sudden (yeah, that was a hint on the topic).  At the moment, I just have a plan to make a plan.  And as far as I'm concerned, that's a good start.