There is only one week left in National Novel Writing Month and in spite writing almost every day while on vacation at Walt Disney World, I am still only about half-way to the 50,000 word mark.   I plan to put in some marathon sessions over Thanksgiving weekend as I am determined to finish the draft by the end of the month.    I know that this draft will need a lot of work in months to come, but I will have created the raw material from which to form the finished book.   I’m glad that I signed up for this project, and even more glad that I let people know, through emails, facebook status updates, and in this blog that I was embarking on this project.   With so many people rooting for me I can’t give up now.

I’ve had many ideas for novels over the years, but when I set down to write this one, I didn’t choose any of the ideas that have been percolating in my mind for so long.   Instead,  I found inspiration in a podcast from Garrison Keillor and it took off from there.  In one week the draft of my first novel will be done.   Then the rest of the work will begin.   As Stephen King describes it “When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

This week at Walt Disney World I had the pleasure of a visit from a friend, Jody Ann Malsbury, whom  Carey and I hadn’t seen since our  very first visit to WDW nineteen years ago.   After a delicious lunch at the Biergarten at Germany, Jody and I spent an afternoon of laughter and reminiscing of places we had gone and experiences we had together when we had lived and worked near each other over two decades ago.    Our lives had changed so much in those nineteen years: Carey and I had moved from Boston to Austin to New Jersey, Jody had a beautiful daughter, but we still laughed the way we did when we were in our twenties, whether at a nine pound lemon in the greenhouses at The Land (imagine how a wedge of that would look in your iced tea) to Ellen DeGeneres pointing at my new haircut in the pre-show film at the Universe of Energy (yes, she was pointing to me) to the hilarious film of our future at the end of Spaceship Earth.

It’s less than a week before Thanksgiving and I am thankful for my friends, many of whom I am reconnecting with on facebook.   Thank you for a wonderful visit, Jody, and for the gift of friendship that has stood the test of time.