Call me crazy

[We supercede our regularly-scheduled Friday Rocks! to present this Very Important Message.]

No, really. Go ahead, call me crazy. DO IT! Because I'm planning to do something I have no sane reason to even consider.

I'm talking NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. Fifty-thousand words in thirty days of forced-march writing. For someone who hasn't written anything resembling fiction in over 30 years*, that's a tall order.

I've been toying around with the idea since I first heard of it last Dec., just after the 2007 NaNoWriMo ended. I got really wound up about it but figured I had a whole year to get over it. I mentioned it here a couple of months ago, just to see what it felt like to say it out loud. I was pretty sure that by the time October rolled around, the Shiny! would have faded and I would have been distracted by something else.

No luck. I may really do this thing.

And that makes me officially crazy. To meet the goal, I'll have to write an average of 1667 words/day. My longest post to date (excluding my throat-clearing exercises here and here) is just about 1000 words, and even that, thanks to my attention span, took a couple of days to shit craft. Hell, my word count for the entire first year of this blog was only about 60,000. And I dare to think I can spew 83.3% of that in fiction form in a month?

Sure! Why the hell not? No one said it had to be good, or even intelligible. No one else ever has to see it. I've even been preparing, kind of: I was overcome by an unprecedented surge of inspiration a month or so ago and drafted the barest outline of a possible story. I worked on it for a week or two and haven't touched it since, but I think about it almost every day. I've read the official guide, and have even been lurking on the NaNoWriMo forums.

I've also set up a FirstGiving page. See, I'm planning on donating to The Office of Letters and Light**, the non-profit responsible for the whole NaNoWriMo thing, a penny for every ten words on my official word count, which will be updated daily (more or less) over there on the left. I'll probably make my donations at the end of each week. If I meet the 50K minimum, that's a minimum $50 contribution. So yeah, I'll be stressing myself out for a month and paying for the privilege. Can it get any better than that?

Hey, wanna sponsor me***? Meet (or beat) my contribution, or even contribute one dollar, and I'll... send you my eternal thanks. Or something. I'll think of something, I promise.

So how will this latest manifestation of Shiny! affect this blog, Dear Reader? It means that November posts may be heavy on the ranting and whining about my "novel". But I still think it will be a grand adventure. A grand adventure most likely resulting in an epic fail, but that could be spectacular, too.

So pull a lawn chair up to the curb, hold my beer, and watch this!

* Bless Mr. Johnson and Mr. Urbane and their struggles to teach us teen-aged Hoosiers the most rudimentary creative writing skilz.

** Isn't that the coolest name ever?!?

*** Evil Twin already has. The gauntlet has been thrown down!