Right now, I have a little more than a week before the advent of National Novel Writing Month. For the second year in a row, I'm a Municipal Liaison (a local contact who organizes things and provides moral support to the new). In addition to the organizing and leaving home in order to be social, I have to write a novel. How do I gear up?

I've been thinking for some time about my plot - thinking and dreaming and sort of rolling things around in my mind. But I haven't committed a single thing to paper (even virtual paper). For some reason, that just never works out for me. I can outline all the livelong day in my mind, but the minute I write it down somewhere, everything goes to hell. I can't find my outline, I find it burdensome to keep referring to it, it somehow just drives me crazy.

It's important that I keep my story in my mind at all times, though. I achieve phenomenal noveling speeds when I'm really working at it, but only because the story is always right there, on the tip of my brain. I can't take a break from it, or the trail goes cold (how many more metaphors can I cram in here?).

The hardest part is the wait. My brain is just itching to get weaving on this, but...like everyone else, I have to wait until November.