My Nanowrimo

I figured out how to do it.

I’m not a novelist. Well, I’m not one right now. I don’t have the organization, I don’t have the consistency of focus, I have too much cool stuff to do and not enough time to do more than half of it. Can I tell you about my life right now?

I do lots of things. Recurring things like the Dr. Hal Show, like Bad Movie Night, like events put on Chicken John, or Kinky Salon, or CSC, or the Cacophony Society, or the parties of friends. I write lots of stories and I post lots of pictures of the places I’ve been and things I’ve done. That takes up enough time. Then I go on roadtrips or clean up the backyard or buy stuff or perform a dozen other productive-lifestyle like things. Is one still a weekend warrior if one never has weekends off? Then I design websites. I practice Spanish. I read cool blogs. I do the things I want to and by and large I want to do the things I like.

Where do ya see the Great American Novel in all of this? I don’t. Last year, I decided I had a story to tell. And old story, a true story, a complex and interesting story from my own life story going through middle school in a faux-magic pre-Rowling semi-LARPer reality-fanfic microculture. It woulda been interesting. Living my life interceded and I never got beyond my one page of story and seven pages of notes. Seven pages of beautifully thoughtful, detailed notes.

Not this year. This year I take a different tack—why not write as I do anyways, here on my public blog glot? If that’s not good enough (which it’s not) I need to up the ante. What’s 50,000 words? That’s… 1,666.6 words a day. Wow, that seems like a lot. I’m gonna need to set up a counter. And I’m gonna need to blog every day. See what we got already… 333?! Man, I’m only 1/5 there! For one day! Well, I think I served my purpose nonetheless in announcing it. One last thing is required: a pledge.

I promise, for the next thirty days, the month of November 2007, C.E., to participate in Nanowrimo by writing daily posts on my public website (this one), toward the goal of completing Nano’s 50,000 word target, and heretofore shall not engage in ridiculous and repetitive repetition of words or word phrases, to the effect that they shall lengthen the length of my posted posts, or otherwise engage in raffish or disregardful writing which is not of “publishable” quality, nor shall I copy and paste IM conversations, run vast backlogs of Twitter tweets, or, for that matter, put forth any generally unreadable and un-paragraphical tripe, nor forget the audience entirely and engage in stream-of-consciousness narrative monologist activity, and will someday make that appointment for the optometrist like I’ve been hoping to, and shall to the greatest degree probable fulfill this promise to the greatest degree that I want to.

There you have it. Around 500 words, and most of them actual words. Expect more of the same, folks.