Last Call For NaNoWriMo

Yes, today is the last day of October- Halloween, or Reformation Day, or maybe Christmas if you're a programmer, or-

The eve of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2011.

This looks deceptively pleasant.

Plots have been outlined, characters sketched, worlds built, brains wracked. Starting tomorrow, I'll be attempting to put down 1,667 words per day into a more or less coherent storyline. By the end of the month I should have at least 50,000 words of an epic fantasy novel: [Working Title] The Sword of the Sentinel. You can follow my progress or my mental deterioration, but I'll not be blogging in the meantime.

It's not too late to join in the madness. Otherwise, I'll see you on the other side. With a novel.

For Those About To Write

November is coming.

Two years ago I dedicated the month to growing a beard of epic proportions. This time around I'll be writing a novel of epic proportions.

That's right, NaNoWriMo. It's an annual challenge for would-be authors to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. And this year, I'm doing it. I am going to write 1,667 words per day, every day, for one month. And by the end I will have a fairly significant portion of a book.

I've already posted a few excerpts from the epic pseudo-fantasy story that I'm putting together. This is a project that I've been working on slowly for several years now, but I'm finally ready to do some serious writing. I've been using TiddlyWiki to keep notes on everything, following discussions on Writers.SE, and I've run lots of ideas past a few privileged friends. There are several more pages of unpublished excerpts lying around, and many more fragments floating around in my head. It's time to start merging everything into a solid storyline.

The working title of my novel is The Sword of the Sentinel. You've already met the main character:

Rael was just an ordinary young man from the borderlands who longed for an adventure. He never suspected when he fell in with a traveling band of traders that he would take his place among the Sentinels, the legendary guardians of the free lands. Now, with the threat of a terrible war looming, Rael finds himself in the midst of a desperate quest to unite the people of the world against the coming darkness.

You can follow along on my NaNoWriMo page as I race towards 50,000 words starting Tuesday, November 1.

Read My Lips: More Blog Posts

John Stewart recently surmised on his most respected Daily Show, in reference to Sarah Palin's ongoing flirtatious antics, that "you can have a colorful bus, and drive to early primary states, or you can go around telling people what you would do if you were President, but when you put those two together there's really only two possibilities. You are either running for President of the United States, or you are a crazy person."

That got me thinking again about one potential use for this blog. Given that I have no intentions of taking a bus tour or any other form of road trip, it follows that I could safely annotate my hypothetical Presidential bid and/or administration without the risk of coming across as a crazy person. In theory, anyway.

It seems, then, that I may begin writing as if I were in fact running for or holding office to prime the discussion ahead of an entirely not real political gambit. Much like the cunning Locke and Demosthenes of Ender's Game, enlightening the world with my intellectual prowess in order to eventually dominate. Because we all know that's how politics on the Internet works.