It's Halloween and I'm scared.

Well, not really scared, but perhaps... apprehensive.

I'm preparing to do something that will be rather demanding, and I'm not sure that I'm mentally or physically prepared to do it, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

I'm writing a novel in November.

Yes, that's right, I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, better known by the melodious abbreviation Nanowrimo. The goal of participants is to write a 50,000-word novel in the period between midnight tonight and midnight on November 30th. At 1667 words per day, one must maintain a fairly quick pace, and stopping to edit or rework or worry about phrasing is pretty much out. No, this is about pure output--not so much writing as typing.

I'm also cheating.

Nanowrimo's rules, such as they are, demand that you start fresh, with a new idea. In theory, this will free you to focus on the new book and quit worrying about ruining that great idea for a book you had five years ago. I'm ignoring that rule and instead using an idea that I first had in 1990 and have been trying to beat into shape ever since--the one that forms the core of a novel whose working title is "Moving Day." I don't want to say too much about that core, or about the bits of novel I've written so far; let's just say that over the past decade, I've taken the basic idea and worked it into approximately two dozen different forms with two dozen different characters, sometimes as a short story, sometimes as a novella, sometimes as a novel, using every point of view from first to third, from limited to omniscient. I've never written more than a few thousand words of it before getting stuck, so my hope is that I can use the pressure-cooker of Nanowrimo to get me past the blocks that have inevitably appeared. Whether I use any of the old stuff isn't the question--it's whether I can get another 50,000 words down this month.

I'm a pretty fast worker--when I have time to work. The hard part will be finding that time between classes, debate tournaments, dorm duties, exams, and grading. I'm going to try to get up early every morning and hit the word processor with everything I've got, but I may end up cranking out longer stretches on weekends to give myself room for a few short days.

One good thing: Kelly's joining me in the madness, so we'll be able to pressure each other a bit. She doesn't like to use the computer to compose, so I shouldn't have any problems getting access to the keyboard, but it'll be nice to have someone prod me out of bed in the mornings. She did Nanowrimo last year and bogged down on her book (working title: "Licking Melvin.") after about 15,000 words, but it was a good experience for her; she wrote the single biggest chunk of prose she's ever written, and when she looked over the manuscript last month, she discovered that it was, despite having been composed in a rush over the course of one month, pretty good. I hope I can get as much out of the experience.

Because of the novel's demands, I may not be writing that much in this journal during the next few weeks, but given how irregular my performance here has been since school started, I don't know that anyone will notice. I'll be making periodic updates here, though, so you can follow along at home. Otherwise, I'll see you circa December 1st--be ready.

(Hey, that was just over 600 words in around a half-hour... all right!)
10:50 AM

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