Happy Thanksgiving . . .Ugh!

That IS a challenge. The best way is to master the art of talking while you're writing. Or, at the very least, looking/sounding (depending whether the talker is with you or on the phone) like you are listening. Of course, as the oldest of five, I mastered that art by the time I was a teenager, so it was no big deal for me to write while on the phone with my sister for an hour. Another option is to "involve" the people around you. People tend to think you're antisocial when you're on the computer. If you keep half an ear on the conversation and occasionally interject something, and moan and groan a bit about your writing and maybe read some especially horrible sentence out loud or ask somebody a question relating to your story, it amuses and interests people and they don't seem to think you're being as quite as rude. (They will still think you're weird, but every Wrimo gets used to that.)

Maybe more useful advice is to do the 15-minute spurt thing, especially if you have a corner where you can leave the laptop set up. Write for a few minutes, join the conversation, slip away when there's a lull or the conversation drifts to something that doesn't involve you or everybody is busy napping or watching football. It might take you all day to do your 2K words, but you WILL still have 2K words at the end of the day. We don't get any bonus points if we have a high words per hour--it's only the words themselves that count.

Oh, and FORGET SLEEP!!! Today I wrote (more or less) for 45 minutes, then wrote for an hour and a half after sane people were in bed. I'm going to be exhausted in the morning, but I got 3K words and I'm only one day behind (according to my NaNoWriMo spreadsheet) even with all the days I haven't written.

Thanks. I'll be using all of those to play catch up, especially the last.