For the past cou­ple of weeks, I’ve been get­ting ready for NaNoW­riMo. My out­line was pol­ished, my projects were prepped, and my snack stash packed until it was overflowing.

Then we got a foot of snow on Octo­ber 29.

Our power (and run­ning water, and inter­net) was out for almost a week. The local Barnes & Noble cafe trans­formed into a high tech refugee camp. Even Hal­loween was canceled.

Need­less to say, this was not an aus­pi­cious start to NaNoWriMo.

NaNo Day 1, I wrote 111 words on my iPhone out of desperation.

Day 2 was Take Your Freez­ing Mom to Work Day (AKA, the local B&N cafe, or the only place in town with work­ing wifi). Humil­i­at­ing hijinks ensued. I love my mom, but she can be chatty, so she was asked (nicely, I swear) not to talk my ear off all day while I attempted to work on the bogged down wifi net­work. At one point dur­ing the after­noon, the guy at the table next to us started talk­ing about how we rely so heav­ily on our tech­nol­ogy. He men­tioned he was here to work on his novel which was about the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of  just that. Plenty of cre­ative inspi­ra­tion abounded with the unwashed white col­lar masses camp­ing out in the aisles of B&N, des­per­ate to hook up to their company’s net­work or charge their Black­berry. He even took out a cover flat of his upcom­ing sec­ond novel (part of a multi-book deal! With Kens­ing­ton! Totally legit, almost NYT best­selling author!) to show us.

Cool, right?

Unfor­tu­nately, she chose that moment to tell him I work for a com­pany in Ari­zona and they don’t under­stand snow so I’m under a lot of pres­sure and she’s pretty sure he’s both­er­ing me. And in the same breath, she told him I’m a writer, too.

Me: O.o

*dies*

…

*dies again*

…

*dies some more*

By Day 3 of NaNo we’d been with­out power for 4 days and finally man­aged to get a hotel room. With heat! And run­ning water! And inter­net! And I wrote ALL THE WORDS. Well, almost. I was still behind, but I def­i­nitely made progress.

I finally caught up to where I needed to be on Day 5–just one day after we got our power back. Cur­rently, my total is 10,171. It’s been quite a week! Hope­fully, I’ll gain some momen­tum over the next few days.

So how goes your NaNo?