Monday, November 02, 2009

... a rod to my back

i signed up late last month for a month of insanity this month, commonly referred to as nanowrimo, a wonderful, rolls-trippingly-off-the-tongue acronym for "national novel writing month". what began as an american thing quickly evolved into an international thing, as well as yielding other texts besides novels. (i am assured that there is a forum on the nanowrimo website for "nanorebels" - those people who regard the strictures of nanowrimo as being much like the pirates' code: more of a guideline than a rule.)

at present i have managed to knock together a little over 1600 words, or a little less than the daily average required to come up with the fifty thousand words that nanowrimo exhorts participants to achieve. the website itself is unapologetic for its disregard for the quality of the produced work - the emphasis is on quantity. diving for quality (a task not unlike diving for pearls, apparently) is a task left for the editing process. there may be some to be found but you might want to be careful about holding your breath.

so i have three ideas that i have been tossing up between:
  1. a straight-out fantasy story using the campaign source material i created for a dungeons & dragons group i used to play with,
  2. a body-swap story where a cat and the cat's owner wake up one morning in each other's bodies, and
  3. a story about a guy who buys some revenge-of-the-nerds-style horn-rimmed glasses and is finds himself haunted by the spirit of the glasses' previous owner.
i'm not going to say which one i've picked.

please pray for me that i'll stick to my personal plan of 2000 words a day, with a day off a week, and that i'll not let anything else slide (too much) throughout november. like... oh, i don't know... sleep? proper meals? church commitments? getting to work on time?

thanks!

4 comments:

Julie said...

you've left out the most important detail - are you going to let us read your creation? hope the writing goes swimmingly :)

can you send me a quick email ping when you get a second - i've been meaning to email you for a while but i'm not sure which address...

Jess said...

So, Dr Vale, how is the novel going?

Eleanor said...

I want to see what you produced, post haste!

dr maya vale said...

yeah... no.

i produced so little, no-one's going to be seeing any of it.

but thanks for being interested! maybe next year.