Oh, we know it's here... It's like, almost flawlessly, Sunday of the second week rolls around and everything comes to a screeching halt. The first excitement has worn off and now you're stuck with a poor excuse for a story and 3 more weeks of stretching what little plot you have into a full 50,000 words. It's painful, almost in the literal sense. It hurts your brain to push out the plot you have buried in there... If you've been watching my profile, (or my progress report) you see two days where I haven't done anything and it wasn't even planned for ahead of time like Election Day was. As of this post, I am behind... To finish, I need 1669 words a day instead of the balanced 1667. As of this post, I have 18,000 words instead of my goal of 22,000 by Day 11. So what am I doing instead? Writing a blog post!

Here are a couple of tips for me as well as any of you folks who are idly reading my site because you're not writing your story, either... First off, never read what you wrote. That's a bad idea. Not only will it waste time, but there's always the chance you'll change (or worse, ERASE) what you've already done and if you start doing that, chances are you'll reduce your word count and that's horrible for morale, especially in Week 2. It's hard to read back over what you've said and cringe in your chair, but that's what you can't do! At least not until after you've finished. It's a rough draft... It's supposed to be ugly! What you do with a rough draft is not use it as a whole, but only harvest little snips and rearrange them into something far more coherent.

Another tip I've come to realize... Never stop when you're blocked. Bad idea. Probably the single worst thing you can do. You write and write and write and hit a snag and decide to take a break. Bad! You will take a break, start doing something fun, and then remember that book you're trying to write. You'll think about starting it up again, but then remember that you're stuck and that you haven't figured out a way to get around it... If that happens, you're in trouble. It takes a massive amount of willpower to overcome something like that. That's why I'm missing two days in my charts. I stopped on a mental block and started doing fun stuff like watching Heroes first season and all sorts of stuff like that... Luckily, I don't have a block at the moment and I'm about ready to dive back in. My goal for today is 22,000, but that's 4,000 more words, so I'm going to settle for 20,000 and then make up for it tomorrow and get back on track. Once you hit 25,000 words, trust me, it gets a lot more fun again.

So that's that... They say it's a good idea to write for 20 minutes or so, then take a 10 minute break, then dive back in for another 20 minutes. "Word sprinting" I guess is what they call it. I would suggest listening to the WriMoRadio episodes they churn out every couple of days. It's a breath of fresh air... It's comforting to know that thousands of other people are having the exact same problems you are. And by exact, I'm not exaggerating, either... They all have EXACTLY the same problems. It ain't just you... It's a fact of novel-writing life that you can't get around. You run into plot problems and character problems and you start thinking it's crappy and you want to quit... For days like that, I try to remember that JRR Tolkien felt the same way about Lord of the Rings. (And I swear I bring this up every NaNoWriMo!) Tolkien hated his story and repeatedly wanted to just give up, but CS Lewis kept pestering him to finish it... And once he managed to get it published, it was a huge hit that nobody has been able to top.

So get to writing!

So now you Democrats have what you want... A Democrat controlled Congress with a Democrat President on the horizon. Hope and change is around the corner! Oh yeah! The stock markets continue to plummet, AIG demands a second, far larger bail out that Congress is allowing, American Express successfully petitions to be classified as a bank so they have easier access to government bail outs, and those responsible for the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are all in charge of taking government money and giving it to people who made horrific business decisions (with encouragement from the Democrat government) so that nobody is able to learn from their mistakes so that they won't repeat the mistakes in their next endeavor. In addition to all that, where does the money for the bail outs come from? Why, where all the money for the government comes from! YOU! And what they can't take from you, they'll borrow from countries that definitely don't have our best interests in mind and forever drive our national debt higher and higher! What a bright, bright future! All hail the messiah! But just watch them... They'll still somehow manage to blame Bush and the Republicans in a year or two, despite the fact that they've been a minority voice since 2006 and that anything that does or does not pass since 2006 could have been changed solely by the Democrats.

And after all this time of preaching about how the government should "listen to the people" when it comes to things they want to push... When the people speak out against something the liberals don't want, suddenly, they need the courts to get involved and repeal the votes of the people. (Please refer to developments surrounding Proposition 8 in California which, if you haven't heard already, banned homosexual marriages.) You bet... When it comes to these types of things and they think there's a good chance that the people will support it, they scream and holler about how the Republicans are shoving off their morals on everyone by ignoring the majority, but when the very same majority essentially destroys everything a liberal minority has been working for? You suddenly hear no shouts to listen to the people. No, you hear shouts for the government and court systems to step in and overrule the people.

Government overruling people? Courts overruling people? Proposition 8 amended the California constitution to ban gay marriage... But the liberals, ever the sore losers, are still trying to get the courts to say the proposition is unconstitutional. They want to call their constitution unconstitutional... Excuse me? Something being "constitutional" isn't some interpretive idea that's floating around in everyone's mind... Something being "constitutional" is simply what ever is written or not written in the Constitution. Period. If gay marriage is banned in the constitution, you cannot claim it's unconstitutional. It's hilariously stupid!

I just want to say, right now, for those of you who'd say "yeah, well, if they constitutionally allowed gay marriage, you'd be outraged, too". Yeah, I probably would... But first, let me say a couple things. First? I expected California to allow gay marriage... I really did. They're probably the most liberal state in the country. I was extraordinarily pleased when I heard it passed. Unexpected! Second? I'm a conservative... You all know this. Because of that, I was rooting for McCain/Palin. They lost... Badly, when you take electoral votes. As you can see, I am not filling my blog with incredibly vulgar expletives pasted 500 times over... I'm not rioting in the streets of downtown Los Angeles. The majority of Americans felt they wanted Obama as their next president... Even if there was every reason for McCain to ask for a recount in the close states, he didn't. He conceded. It's over, and I'm not bitter. Scared out of my mind, but I have always believed that the way this country elects government officials has been the single best way to run a country and I still think the process works brilliantly.

But Obama isn't even a president yet... He's pretty much nothing right now. He's "President-Elect". He has no power at the moment and he can't do anything. He's not Constitutionally allowed to do anything until Inauguration Day. But he hasn't even done anything yet and we already have a glimpse of what the next four years is going to bring us. A complete and total economic failure due to an increasing amount of bail outs, tax hikes and wealth redistribution that encourages nobody to get off their butt and create new wealth in a time of economic recession and threat of depression. A complete and total override of the peoples' voice, which could and should be considered a treasonous disregard for the government limits placed in the Constitution, when the courts declare gay marriage legal in all states. Obama's going to reduce the size and power of our military like Clinton did... In addition that, Obama said himself that no military has maintained its supremacy in an economic downturn. He's going to wreck the economy AND cut funding in a time where Russia and Iran are both building strength.

What a bright, bright future, indeed! I am so glad we have the Democrats to lead us! Where are the conservatives when you need them? Wake up, Republicans! Centrism is a lie! The Democrats work down the party lines and you're the only ones trying to walk down the middle... Who are people going to vote for? A Democrat or someone who's pretending to be a Democrat? Someone who keeps pushing the same ideas or someone who flip flops more times than a fish out of water? Someone you know is going to react a certain way in any decision or someone who's not going to know how to respond until the crisis rears its ugly head? Take a look at the election! Conservatism never lost where it was up for a vote... True conservatism, that is. Things like gay marriage bans... Rejecting global warming intiatives... True conservative governors and representatives and senators! America is lost for the next 4 years if all this is a foreshadow of things to come, and it IS! We need to rebuild the conservative base and roar back onto the scene with a second Ronald Reagan who will have the guts and strength to clean up the socialist liberal economic mess that will be left behind after an Obama administration. It's rallying time!