So my already lax posting habits will be getting worse, but it won't be because I'm not writing. I've decided (at Laura's urging) to participate in this year's NaNoWriMo (which is a fun to say abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month). Founded by Chris Baty, the goal is simple. Start writing a novel at midnight on November 1st and keep writing your novel until it reaches 50,000 words. If you make it by November 30th, you win!
I like it because:
1) It's thoroughly insane.
2) It allows for an opportunity to meet other thoroughly insane people and complain.
3) It enforces a deadline which usually helps me produce my best work.
4) It encourages quantity over quality, which helps break the perfectionist procrastination trap, and may help me get through my other projects.
I have no idea what I'm going to write yet. I'm throwing some ideas around. I plan on posting excerpts up here on the blog as it goes along, since I won't have much time to write anything else. Also, the election season will (hopefully) be over by the time I start so it will be a nice break.
In any case, I encourage all of you to join this insanity. You get to write shitty prose, waste lots of time, alienate and piss off your loved ones, and at the end of it all you'll have a long mostly crappy book to show for it. What more you could ask for? It's one more crappy book than most other people have written.
before the obvious, "you are crazy" comment back, I would like say, I am not really envious, except that you have the drive to undertake such a painful endeavor. I hate so much of my writing it would be like purposefully breaking wind in a convent so that the nuns will whack my knuckles with a ruler.
Breaking wind everyday. 1500 times a day.
I have also taken on a November writing project. It is tenetively called "Active Sensing for Structural Health Monitoring" and looks to be a real crowd pleaser.
andy! Why aren't you writing a novel!?!?!?! Write one dammit!
Excerpt from "Active Sensing for Structural Health Monitoring - The Novel":
...but then, Ray came to the horrific realization that the second floor had not been instrumented! Entire modes could not be caluclated from this incomplete data. Incomplete data!!! OHH NOOO!!! They would have to run the test again and everyone would be late to lunch! And it was sushi day... the horror! The Horror! Then Ray's face was eaten by a giant invisible clown...