Goodbye Sanity

Well all, today is a big day. It’s November 1st and thus day one of a project I joined against all logic and sense of self worth.

Today is the beginning of the National Novel Writing Month. It’s the month where thousands and thousands of people decide to sacrifice sleep, food, friends, family, health, sanity, and any other such nonsense that might get in the way of their goal: to write a 50,000 word novel inside of a month.

This is of course no small task. (Thankfully they measure word quantity not quality) I can’t for the life of me offer one reasonable statement in support of the idea that I have any hope of actually accomplishing this goal. I can’t even seem to get the stuff I NEED to get done done. Still a great many others every single year manage to do it, and somehow they roped me into it this year too.

I can’t REALLY be (as I suspect) the least likely to succeed … I mean, surely there are others who are as desperately hopeless in this endeavor as I am and who are still giving it a try.

I mean any of the American participants are going to, like me, have Thanksgiving getting in the way. Many participants, like me, have a full+ time job. I assume some of them also like me have to spend a great many hours of the month at airports and in airplanes. I’m sure there are others who, like me, have jury duty in the middle of November. Also … perhaps … there are others who, like me, must prepare and execute a presentation at their local Apple store in Mid-November. I’d even be willing to bet that there are those who like me recently scored a 20 on the ADD self test (an 11 means see a Dr.).

I bet that many of them also like me can’t spell worth a darn. I imagine there is a handful who – like me – has no real talent.

And yet here we are still doing it.

I guess I decided to do it because I’ve had a story idea in my head for almost a year now. Ironically it’s not that story that I’m going to use for NaNoWriMo. See the story I have in my head has one serious flaw: it has no really solid concept of the bad guy. So for my NaNoWriMo project I’m going to write a 50,000 word novel about the villain of the story that I REALLY want to write.

This way even if the end result of the NaNoWriMo project sucks (and it most assuredly will) … I’ll have at least fleshed out the bad guy for the story.

Now … I honestly don’t expect to finish. I hope to … but I don’t expect to. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that I give up after 3 words. But I’m going to try and see what happens.

I’ll be updating my word count to date here on DavidMeade.com. You can see my progress at the top of the main page.

Wish me Luck … and please do forgive me for the mental break down I’m surely going to have. I’m sorry in advance for not taking your calls, answering your emails, slacking on blogs, and for weeping openly every time the thought of my progress so far crosses my mind.

I’ll keep you updated through blogs as often as I can, but most of my writing this month should be on the book.

So watch the word count, offer words of encouragement, discuss how crazy I am for doing this, watch for the blogs/vlogs/podcasts that I do manage to publish, and pray that we all make it to December!

(To make it I need to aim for 2,000 words a day. I HAVE to hit 1667 words a day. This blog was 650 words long)