Nanowrimo
November is National Novel Writing Month, a yearly event organized by some group with a website and the premise that November is a good time to get everyone to try to write a 50,000 word novel (or novella, if you’re concerned about taxonomy) in 30 days. “National” doesn’t refer to any nation in particular, and no nation I know of officially sponsors this event; it just makes it sound better. For the first time in several years I’m not spending November trying to move or change jobs or finish a semester’s projects, so I’m going to take a shot at it. I need to write 1700 words a day in order to meet the 50,000 word goal. I’ve averaged about 500 words per blog entry for 2006, so I just need to do three and half times that much work every night.
I have a profile page, the word count on which I will update when I remember, so you can watch the numbers to see that I’m not just goofing off. I didn’t do one bit of planning for this, so the resulting pile of words is going to be quite dreadful, but that’s not really the point. It’s more like a workout for amateur writers, getting everyone to stick with the exercise out of peer pressure. I suppose that some people have a bit more concern for the content of nano-novels, what with the system provided for posting and critiquing novel excerpts and all that, but I don’t plan to take that route. The five some-odd thousand words I have so far are, in my opinion, kind of flat and boring, I don’t have a coherent plot yet, and I think that making Zombie Rosa Parks a main character is probably a sign that I was short of ideas on day 3. I’m still going to stick with it, sucky or not. I hit 1700 on days one and two, fell short at 675 before going to bed after mexicans on Friday, and I’m up to 1700 or so far for today, so hopefully I can get back on track tonight and maybe even pull a little ahead over the weekend. I’ll let you know if I get to 50,000.