Enviro Your NaNoWriMo

As soon as this merry little post appears in the blogosphere, I've written more posts for November than I did in October. That's just sad. I haven't had a 1-post month since 2004.

The other evening in class (I'm an online grad student; I know you've probably all forgotten about my adventures in education), our instructor asked, "Does anyone have any questions about today's assignment before we begin?" I said "Can I have October back? I'd like to give it another go." She agreed that she would also like to try October again, but she doesn't have that kind of power. How sad for all of us.

Anyway! NaNoWriMo is in full swing, except here, where I've spent the week catching up on homework, a work assignment, and another top-secret project that is not remotely NaNoWriMo-related. Not even a little bit. And since in theory Friday is my environmentally friendly posting day at Cheekyness, I decided to think of ways I could green up NaNoWriMo. (I've been typing it #NaNoWriMo so often on Twitter that I have a hard time leaving off the hashtag. Ye be warned.)

My mug of choice. So big it's
practically two mugs of choice. Also,
it's brilliant, as you can plainly see.

1. Drink your caffeinated beverage from a reusable mug. You're going to be on a first-name basis with the baristas at your local watering hole by the 30th anyway, right? They may as well know what your mug looks like so they can return it to you if you leave it behind one day in a sleep-deprived, alternate-world, writing haze.

2. Unplug your electronics when they aren't in use. Save energy, save money, save yourself from getting up to use the loo at 3 AM and seeing your computer sitting in idle mode and deciding to type "just a couple of quick paragraphs" and still being there when your alarm goes off for work.

3. Short showers. It'll save you time, water, and money. Get a whiteboard and pen in there to write down ideas, but not if it will cause you to linger. If you forget to shower, don't worry about it. You'll get it next time.

4. Only do laundry on the weekends. Save your weekday evenings for writing, and save all your clothes up until you have a full load. And then ask your spouse/roommate/children/neighbours to do it for you so you can keep writing.

5. Writing by hand? Make sure to get as much use as possible out of your pens and pencils. Sharpen those things down to nothing. Use the last drop of ink. Write on both sides of the paper. Use those discards from the printer that have one little line of text at the very bottom.

6. Eat oranges, tangerines, pears, and apples. They're in season now. (Okay, in most of the US they're in season now.) No prep required, the peels are edible or compostable (or both, if you're anything like my husband-- he loves eating orange peels), and you can stave off the NaNoWriMo 10. (I don't know if that's really a thing. But I bet it is.)

7. Resist the urge to print. Look, it's a first draft. Those are always going to be cruddy. Don't print it out until you de-cruddy it a bit. Or a lot.

8. Seven is probably a good number of tips, yeah?

9. Just leave the dust alone. It will still be there in December. That's not really an enviro-tip so much as a NaNo survival tip. But hey, it will save you either washing or tossing the dustrags for a while, and there's probably an environmentally friendly practise in there somewhere.

10. Don't drive! Carpool or take the bus. Valuable writing time. Save gas. Less pollution. Transcribe bizarre conversations directly into your novel. It's a win-win-win-win. Change the names of your carpool buddies in your novel before you get it published, though.

Well, that was the longest "I'll just write a quick blog post before bed!" ever. Dangit. Have a happy Friday, everybody!

Are you a WriMo? Let's be friends! I'm cheekysu. (The one in Austin, in case that link doesn't work like I think it's going to work.)