Soon to Vanish Within My Garret

NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month) kicks off tomorrow, and I'll be participating. For those who missed my attempt last year, NaNoWriMo is a completely insane quasi-competition in which people from all over the planet use the month of November to write a 50,000-word novel. It doesn't have to be a good novel. It doesn't have to be publishable, or literary, or even particularly coherent. It just has to be 50,000 words or longer by midnight in your time zone November 30th, with no prose having existing for the novel before the start of the month, for you the writer to "win."

There are any number of reasons why this can justly be called crazy: November is, at least for Americans and most westerners, the second-busiest month of the year, with a holiday, traveling, shopping, family obligations and the like all impinging. It's also a shorter month (30 days), and (well, for some this is an issue, not me) happens November right after the switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time, so circadian rhythms can be off.

Why do it? I participated last year, and while I didn't win, having topped out at 28,500 words, it was a seminal event for me as a writer: I'd never generated so much prose at one prolonged whack before. Some of it was even pretty good, and the corpus from last year's effort should be editable into something interesting down the road. I'm not sure whether all the rest of the prose I'd ever generated in my life before NaNoWriMo '05 added up to 28,500 words. It had a miraculous effect on my confidence as a budding writer and eventual published novelist.

So this year, I'm going to win. I've picked a slightly less esoteric subject for my novel this time, so existential and other issues won't be the ones slowing me down. I've put together a mind map of the rough plot, characters, themes I want to explore, and other minutiae so as to clear some of the logistical that roadblocks that slowed me down last time.

On top of all that, the stalwart and steadfast Amy is on board and being wonderfully supportive. Changes the entire landscape when you've got such a lovely cheerleader on your side.

-Rich

PS. And, via Tripp,

You scored as Reformed Evangelical. You are a Reformed Evangelical. You take the Bible very seriously because it is God's Word. You most likely hold to TULIP and are sceptical about the possibilities of universal atonement or resistible grace. The most important thing the Church can do is make sure people hear how they can go to heaven when they die. Neo orthodox 57% Reformed Evangelical 57% Roman Catholic 43% Emergent/Postmodern 32% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 29% Fundamentalist 25% Modern Liberal 21% Classical Liberal 18% Charismatic/Pentecostal 4% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com