National Novel Writing Month approacheth.
This is a cool project in which the goal is to have finished a 50,000-word novel by midnight, Nov. 30.
This year, I am a participant. I like that the thrust of the project is completion. It doesn't have to be 50,000 of the best writing ever. You just have to finish. It can be 50,000 words of crap, really.
I've been writing on and off since I was about 8 or 9, but I didn't get serious about it until high school.
It wasn't uncommon for me to get home from school and knock out 15 pages. I didn't have anything like a car or a social life to slow me down.
In college, I took a few creative writing courses, just to make sure I kept up with the writing. While I was in one class, I got published in a small magazine with my very first submission. I only submitted it go get extra credit in the class. In another class, I met my wife.
So even if I never wrote after that, I think I got a good deal.
But when I worked at my first newspaper, I weaseled my way in to writing a weekly humor column, which was a lot of fun. And now I'm doing pretty much the same this with this blog for where I work now.
The thing that surprises me the most is that, despite what everyone says, humor writers are not the groupie magnets they're made out to be.
True story.
I'm hoping the NaNoWriMo project will help me motivate myself to not get bogged down with the pre-writing process. If I spent half as much time actually writing as I did getting ready to write, I'd be telling this to Oprah when she picks my book for her book club.
So wish me luck, and I'll let you know how it's going.
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