Bo-Bo Knows It's On...

I threw down a gauntlet and it was...picked up? Matched? Accepted? Whatever it is that the person being thrown down in front of does when accepting a challenge (and let's just say it's pointing a finger in the air and wagging it with all the nuance of a silent movie, cause that makes me happy), my friend Stephen Dorneman over at Barking at My Shadow has done it, and the race is on:

First person to 30 pages by the end of the year gets a beer on the slower writer's dime. 

 Except Stephen says beer isn't special enough.

So if I win he'll buy me a Boston Cream Pie Martini (if you think those letters should be lower case, obviously, you've never sipped such heaven) over at the Omni Parker House, and if he wins, he picks. And if you could hear the sports announcer doing the play by play in my head, Stephen is the front runner.

This weekend he let me know he was already five pages in while I was still navigating the family loop that is the long Thanksgiving holiday in my house.

And today's no more auspicious. Because I didn't just tell him 30 pages. I said 30 pages of the new opening of my book. And so far the new opening has arrived still born. But not much because there's a martini at stake. And a little something called the future of my novel. Right. I'll just get right on that and, um, mmmmm chocolate-cocoa-lined rims....

Why is it so much easier to picture the martini than it is to dream up an opening for my book?