Ooh, it's so fun to see what everyone is doing. I'm surprised there are so many anti-coffee people here.
Aileth, if you need short term accountability stuff, might I suggest writtenkitten.co? (Yes, there is no M at the end. It's just a .co)? The only problem with that one is I will occasionally lapse into writing jibberish, just for want of a new kitten. The bright side is, if you accidentally close out of the window, it saves what you wrote for a short period.
Rosie, I would suggest adding mulled tea to your list, then. Basically, it's black tea and cinnamon and mulling spices in apple juice and it's pretty amazing. I first found out about it last year from our local coffee and tea shop, which got me hooked.
SummerSnow, chocolate definitely helps. As does nutella by the spoonful. The latter was actually how I managed to cope with my bone lab exams in college. I'd have an exam on average once a week, for 2-3 hours, and afterward I'd just come home and eat nutella straight from the jar with a spoon while watching Netflix like a zombie. It was quite therapeutic. Anyway, back to substantive things, your storyline sounds very interesting. Good luck with crafting your ending!
I'm interested in the fact that you're so against skipping,
gazer. I do allow myself to skip, but I usually leave a diatribe in its place about what is frustrating me and why I'm skipping that particular section. So far, the skipped sections have all gotten cut out in the second draft, but the rant has often been helpful in figuring out what was missing that made it awkward in the first place. Do you tend to skip the same sort of scenes, or just like transitional pieces? Also, seconding Rosie's thanks for the tip on the reference desk.
I've had a twisted version of The Little Mermaid that I've wanted to work on, too,
Rosie, although mine is technically still a mermaid, and she does die in the end
because the prince is a wee bit selfish and read all the wrong sorts of books growing up. It's a bit of a mashup between the original TLM and an Andersen's Fairytale that is called something like Seven Brothers--but not the seven brothers everyone thinks about. It's the one where the youngest son is trying to save his father but his lazy brothers keep sabotaging him.
Which leads me to the quandary that is keeping me from deciding what I shall do for November. I've found that, for me to complete a nano that I don't look at in the end and go "this is a complete load of dirigible", I need to have a well laid out plot (at least in my heads) before I start off--often I have a few pages of an utterly breathless "and then...and then...." telling to work off. If I try to pants it entirely, or, worse, don't know the ending, then it just ends up being...awful. Like, not even salvageable. Since I don't have a full plot for a novel, I should pay attention to my senses and not try to pants a novel. Plantsing it (pants + plan) is more successful for me, historically. On the other hand, I have a variety of smaller projects I've been working on that I've really been procrastinating on, and they need to finished. So I *could* cobble together 50k between finishing off my doll short stories series, working on one of novels, and other little nits and lice. But I don't know how successful I would be, since there wouldn't be one completed project at the end for me to point at and go "yeah, I did a first draft of another novel. I'm actually acting like a successful human." The other complication is, I'm much in need with getting my rear in gear for my personal blog, since I'm actually scheduled to be teaching a class on blogging in the spring.
I wonder if I could count my blog word count toward my Nano....
) Going to try again this year--must be crazy!
Oh, and 
(Seems like the rules for NaNoWriMo have gotten a lot vaguer in recent years.) Thanks for the tip on the Reference Desk; I'll have to check that out.
How's that for motivation? 
