The "ah hah" moment

I have never been very good at math, despite the fact that my dad is a retired high school math teacher. He taught chemistry, physics, and geometry to name a few. Anyway, I could do the math, but didn't understand it that well. Not like I should have.

So I was taking a trigonometry class at college. During the summer. One of those 5 week classes. I had been doing OK in it, probably had a C average, but we were working on the equation for the slope of a line. I could barely remember this from high school so why I ever thought I could do it in college is beyond me, but there I was, taking the class. I was at work (police dispatcher at the time) while I was working on the homework. Not much in the way of radio traffic. It was a college PD so nothing hardly ever happened. Anyway, I was working on one problem, trying to find the slope of the line I had been given. I swear the light bulb over my head literally came on when I finally understood what I was doing. It was a moment I will treasure because it will never happen again in relation to math. I ended up with a B overall in the class, which made me and my dad happy.

However, it was happening on Sunday as I pounded out 4,763 words to get caught up in NaNoWriMo. I'm still behind, but that's OK. I'm not as behind as I was at the start of the weekend.

I was working on a scene and the light bulbs just kept going off. None of what I wrote had been planned, but apparently the behind the scenes thinking was starting to pay off. I was able to come up with four or five more scenes to steer the story into a new direction (nowhere near where I had originally intended it to go) and a boost to my lagging word count.

The 'ah-hah' moments can happen apart from a math class for me, for which I'm very thankful. I love this ability to create people and new ideas. My total now stands at 10,763 and I have every intention of making it to 15,001 by midnight Monday.