All that shit up there stands for, "National Novel Writting Month or National Novel for short". This is something that has been going along for a very long time and I am righteously pissed that I have not been informed about it sooner.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
The idea behind it is to write a 50,000 word novel from november 1st to the 30th. Yeah. You prolly won't be writing a very good novel in that length of time but that is kinda the point. It is 30 days and nights of literary abandon, their words not mine. It is where we leave behind concerns like quality, or process, and focus on the activitiy in of itself. Instead of worrying so much about this or that, it is instead, a gun shot, a race, an endurance test, and something you do for yourself. When I tell people about what I am doing they immeadiatly leap twords the idea of publication. I am considering writting another version of this and just handing out an explanation to people. Publication is for people who don't write 50,000 words in a month. This isn't a drive for ecconomic gain, it is a collective test. For 30 days you join a community of people who are all racing twords the same goal. Not racing against each other, but against themselves, the greatest of all enemies. The forums ring with encouragment and there are dozens of resources available to help people get from plot point to plot point.
It isn't about quality, and it isn't about quanitiy, it is just about writing, and the sheer joy that comes with it, ESPECIALLY when you stop caring about anyone else except for the arbitrary goal set before you and the looming date. It is truly a beautiful concept and I am more than excited to be taking part in it.
I started to take part in it last year, but the weird palm pilot, keyboard combo thing I was using ate it. Not all of it, but a good 10,000 words vanished in a blink of an eye when the damn thing crashed while transphering the files onto a backup flash drive. To be fair in all the time I've used that things that has only happened twice. Each time though it was paticularly devistating.
It also prompeted me to start looking for a solution which eventually lead to the rise of the baby laptop. Baby laptop attack! NOM!
evan wrote how writing a novel terrifies him. Well it terrifies me too, that is for certain. I've bearly written any fiction for years, I've been unhappy with my practise fiction, I have a begninng a chunk of middle, and one flashback to work with. Nothing else. I am thinking on sand here. Still all that crap aside, I am going to do it anyway.
Ordinarly that paragraph would be much longer and all of it would be devoted to pressuring evan into joining me in doing it, and trying to drag lior along for the ride to. He apparently is in contact with lior and he reminded me the other night just how much I miss him. Fuck. Oh well. Still evan has his own writting projects which are all coming along rather well so asking him to take on another is a bit much. Maybe next year eh? The whole thing excists to fight fear.
Last point. What the fuck teachers? I realize more and more just how utterly useless most of my creative writting teachers have been over the course of my life. They have ranged from extrodinarly detrimental to my writting to actually kinda helpful. The thing is though, this is something that they should of told us about and encouraged us to do. We should of been doing things like this. We should be teaching others to do things like this, and on and on it goes. The point is that creative writting classes really dropped the ball when it came to things like teaching us about getting published, spotting scams, charity events like this one, movements, and all sorts of other things.
We could all be so much more. For one month I will be. You should be to.
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When you started talking about this novel project, I almost considered giving it a try with you. But, to be honest, from all of the things you said in this post, and the little blurb I read on PvP today saying basically the same thing, Serial Shorts was, for me, basically the same thing. I need to make sure that I have a good buffer for myself, and I need to make sure, above all else, that I have something to post every Monday. So, I write it, then I move on. There's no time for lots of editing. Every Sunday I give the next day's post a proofread, and then it goes up. Serial Shorts is my just gotta keep writing goal. Though, I doubt very much that I'll write 50,000 words for it over the course of the month.
Writing a movie script terrified me also, but I have a feature film script on my hard drive at the moment. I bring this up just to say that the fear is okay... just get through it and then you'll have this thing that you made. Even if it's not that good, (my movie is pretty bad) it's there and you did it.
I'm gonna shoot off an email to Lior telling him that this thing is a thing, and that he should get in on it with you. But I don't really think he will this year. For one thing, he's a couple days behind. But that's not really true... you've been working on this for about a month now. Preparing yourself, and probably running some rough ideas through your head.
Also, he's taking the LSATs on December 5th.
Here's what I'll do though... I figure 50,000 words is about 33 episodes of No School For Wizardry, give or take. I'll set myself a goal of trying to output 15 episodes this month. I just don't think I'm capable of outputting an episode every day, but if I push myself I think I might be able to handle 15 in a month.
I'll let you know what Lior says.
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