At first it’s awful. Because you think you aren’t funny at all.

And then you accept not being funny. Which makes everything ok and somehow you manage to be funny again.

And then you skip a day. Which is fine, these things happen.

But then you skip another day. And you pretend that’s fine too. You can make it up on the weekend- in the words of the youth “Whatevs”.

And then the weekend arrives and you realize you have to write eight thousand words and you’re all

“This is the end of my life!”

And then you get bedsores from sitting in your kitchen chair, not moving and staring at a computer screen. So you vow never ever, ever to get behind again.

For a little while you don’t. And you even get used to writing THAT MUCH every single day, day in day out.

It becomes a thing that you do. Other people have fun lives in the evenings and you write.

But then something happens again and you miss a day. Which is ok, these things happen, it’s just sixteen hundred words, why you banged that out in under two hours last night, no biggie, break it up over a couple of days.

True to your word, you do makeup a little bit writing twenty one hundred words the next day. But then, oh that nasty life, it happens again. And suddenly you find yourself staring down the barrel of five thousand words for one weekend.

So like any good person you put it off. Until seven pm when Canada has become a cold, dark, horrible foreboding place that’s going to sit on your chest and feed you the monthly writing challenge until you cry and churn out the necessary words.

For such a polite country Canada can be a dick sometimes.

So you write words. And you don’t like them. So you write more words. And you like some of them. Then you email your friend who tells you to keep going. So you write about cupcakes because who doesn’t love cupcakes then you look at the screen and think “My God why am I writing about cupcakes?”

That’s what National Novel Writing Month is like. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get up and stretch because my butt is numb.

*I didn’t actually get bedsores. It just felt like I did. I’m fairly certain my butt has retained the shape of my wooden chairs though.