I’m off to a great start, what with a crappy cliche of a pun for the title of my first daily post. These 31 days are going to float by like marshmallows in cocoa, I tell ya!

I do love that the NaBloPoMo topic this month is food, considering I “write” for several food blogs that I’ve sorely neglected for weeks. Actually, “sorely” isn’t appropriate. It hasn’t hurt at all.

Worst-case scenario: if I have a day without a worthwhile blog topic, I’ll simply list what I’ve eaten. Ha! Beating the system!

Uhhhhh … I’m at St. Louis Bread Co. in lovely downtown Prettytown, where I have just consumed an everything bagel with plain cream cheese, a fruit cup and my first cup of coffee in-store. Since I’m a mucus monster, I’m opting for coffee with Splenda (so as to not feed my germs) and skim. I feel empty inside.

And as an aside to my East Coast pal Maggie, St. Louis Bread Co. isn’t Panera. Panera is St. Louis Bread Co. It’s complicated, but trust me on this. I think they changed the name to Panera for the stores outside the St. Louis area because potential customers saw the words “St. Louis” and assumed they’d be injured in a shooting incident if they hung around.

I shouldn’t eat my leftover cream cheese with a knife. Really. Knives are for fighting at STL Bread Co. I might have to take down the septuagenarian biker who’s here every day. A plastic knife with a thin layer of soft cheese should do it.

And I’ve drifted into stream-of-conscious already. That didn’t take long.

If you’re having problems with the new layout, it’s most likely because you’re using Internet Explorer, which hates the world. Brian said he can alter the layout so it works in Explorer. I think that, if you’re using Explorer, you should just change browsers. A copy of Mosaic from 1995 would probably work better than Explorer.

Stream-of-conscious? Check. Prettytown reference? Check. Food reference? Check. Alienating part of my readership? Check. Looks like I’m successful completed Day One.

On a more serious note, why am I blogging daily this month? It’s not so much because I’ve been so lax in blogging in general, but because I’ve been so lax in writing, period, over the past year and a half. That damn Ouija board from the weekend in the woods told me I would have a book published, and that it’s not one I’ve already written. I’ve got the requisie two unpublishable manuscripts in my desk/on various hard drives. Number three is supposed to be The One. Really, I should probably be doing that thing where I write a novel in a month. Because that would certainly be of publishable quality.

I hate to admit it, but I’m in possession of both Writing the Breakout Novel and Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. I paid money for these, and I at least hope to make back my $20, dammit. We all know that great books are written based on what books about writing books, written by people haven’t published any actual fiction books in two and a half decades, right?

NaBloPoMo is a great excuse for not writing for the other blogs that carry my name, and not dealing with those books. Hell, one of them sat in its mailing envelope for two weeks. I opened it five minutes ago to double-check the name for these entry. But if that’s what gets me going …

So far it hasn’t.