I guess I’m going to try my hand at that NaNoWriMo thing this year. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is a little organization that encourages people to plow through becoming a novelist by drafting an entire novel (50,000 words) within the 30 days of November. It is all about writing in quantity without editing or second guessing. The goal, or at least my goal, is mainly just to have some fun with writing and hopefully crank out some new ideas. It may not lead to anything. I may fail. It would be foolish to hope for an On the Road type of improvised writing success, although I have to admit I was fascinated with the idea of trying to write using Kerouac’s typewriter scroll method when I first learned of it and read On the Road as a teenager.
Now, ten or eleven years later, I think I’m going to give it a try. One thing we have up on Kerouac is that word processing does much to facilitate such a writing style. Now that I think of it, probably a big part of Kerouac’s success in writing a great novel in 3 weeks was that his narrative was largely autobiographical, so he was simply describing memories, and memories he was passionate about, rather than making up characters, events and settings. I realize that this is something that I should think upon as I begin. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t dwell upon it, because the point of the exercise is to have fun and be productive and ignore all the rules, I think. Maybe I should place no expectations on myself beyond those just mentioned.
Every day for the next month I need to spew out between 1600 to 2000 words to meet the quota for conquering NaNoWriMo. The words won’t be showing up on this blog, though. I want to put all of my writing energy into my hypernovelwriting project, so the Froz-T-Freez may need to close shop for the off-season. This makes me feel kind of bad because I built this new blog and I was about to hype it to everyone I know, but I already have failed at adding substantial content on a regular basis. (By the way, my idea of “hyping my blog” means to send out a single email to family and friends, letting them know that I have a blog. My method is not quite as extensive as the J.K. Rowling or Kanye West publicity models.) I’ve been debating whether to continue importing my little twitter updates, because I know they can be confusing or irritating in their brevity in a blog context. My original intent was that they serve as interludes to the regular posts. Minimalistic, improvised blog haiku, if you will. I also had the idea that I would use them as seeds for actual blog articles. So far, this post is the first time I have successfully used the twitter seed method; all the other seeds I scattered have not grown. Despite the minor frustration they may cause, I have decided to continue with the twitter updates. They may be the only action this blog sees for another month.
So, thanks for reading, and please wish me luck on my little November writing experiment. I have one request, in all seriousness: please don’t ask me at all what I am writing about. I’ll get nervous and frustrated and I won’t tell you if you do, anyway. As of right now, I don’t know what I’m writing about myself. I guess I’ll find out when I start tomorrow.
Happy November! (I’m kind of a humbug when it comes to that holiday that happens today.)