Good luck, JD!
I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, too. (My page is
here.) I haven't written any significant fiction in several years, I want to see if I can "kick" the creative gears back into place, and NaNo this year seemed like a good way of doing that. I developed an outline in late October and, for the first time in far too long, I actually felt excited about writing fiction. (I write a novel's length worth of non-fiction every month for work, hence the specificity.) Two of the first three days went well, one did not, and my writing instincts, which are honed for work, are losing their minds at some really awful text (ie., November 2nd), but I have to ignore them so I can figure this shit out again.
I don't know that I have any pep talks to offer.
For me, preplanning is key. Not in the sense of having an outline. November 2nd didn't work for me because I hadn't
thought about what I was going to write except to have the outline. I hadn't "blocked" it out in my mind. I tried to sit down and write, with nothing except a dry outline that described a scene, and it was very difficult to make any headway. November 1st, however, was very successful (3k words) because I'd gone to bed on Halloween thinking about it, I thought about it on my commute, so when I sat down at the keyboard after getting home from work, I'd already worked it out in my head. Yesterday was likewise successful (2.5k) for the same reason; I thought about it which scene I was going to write, what I needed to happen, who I needed to be there, and the words flowed easily. Last night I decided I was going to rewrite one of the scenes that failed on Friday, so I thought about it before bed, got up this morning, and tripled the length of scene in half the time that the original took on Friday.
For advice, pull the plug on your computer's Internet connection. It removes the temptation to browser surf. If there's something I realize I need to research, I put it in brackets in the text, and then I'll return to it.
