NaNoWriMo: Day 8

Total word count to date:17121 and it’s starting to get harder and harder to write.

Michael has arrived in Israel, been terrorized by a dog more than actual terrorism, has met his host family’s kids, and had his first day out in Tel Aviv.  Now, as the sun sets, he prepares for a dinner party that his family is having so he can “meet” this girl that Genya wanted to set him up with.  In light of this,

1.  What is the worst thing that could go wrong at a party where two people are artificially arranged to meet each other?

2.  What kind of food to serve at such a gathering, and are the girl’s parents eager to have a potential suitor from America?

This weekend, I stumbled across two articles, neither of which are particularly encouraging to my writing process.  The first is advice to aspiring writers from John Irving in which he says that he would shoot himself if he were 27 and currently writing a novel, and the second is from Wall Street Journal, of writing habits of famous authors.  All of them are pretty painful and I can completely relate.  Maybe someday someone will write about me, “She used to sit at her computer, screaming at herself that pretty much everything she wrote was horrendous, then wrote a hundred more words, thought horrendous again.  But now she is a bajillionaire novelist who has frequent lunches with Orhan Pamuk and Junot Diaz, teaching them how to write,  and laughs all the way to the bank in her black BMW.”