I got a *fantastic* book for Xmas: On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft. I'm almost through and it's got so much good advice and motivation in it that I've started writing again.

One *very* good piece of advice, and one I'm going to be following as of tomorrow morning, is "For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it's wise to eliminate every possible distraction." And he is *soooo* right! Trying to write here in my office, on my big computer, is really difficult. I usually have Firefox open (with at least 12 tabs open on it), of course Skype, then Outlook and whatever else catches my fancy. So in between sentences or paragraphs I surf through my mails, take a look at the newest DA submissions, read a snatch of a story on Y!Gallery and fool around with a browser game. *Definitely* too much distraction. So I've decided to liberate my laptop from my daughter's grabby hands and take it downstairs into the living room, along with my German-English Dictionary, my Webster's and my new Thesaurus (which will hopefully arrive tomorrow) and set up my writing space there. Because there's *no* internet in there. And no phones. And, aside from the cats, no other distractions.

Then I'll write my 1000 words (start with a low goal, King says) and only *then* will I go upstairs, back to the world of distractions... :)

Oh... where did you all find those nifty word counters for NaNo? I'd like to put one up so that I can pressure myself into keeping it up... :)

*dives back into King's book...*

EDIT: Just found this great quote:

"“Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t written anything for a year.”
-Dave Eggers (from an interview with the Guardian)"

And yes, that's *exactly* the problem! ^___^;