Mid-NaNo Update
When you are trying to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month, you generally do not want to use them up on blog posts, no matter how vital the information you want to convey regarding your current eating habits and bowel movements. Twitter becomes the ideal method of dispersing that kind of information, as it requires brevity of its users and thus also encourages levity by virtue of the transitive rhyming property.
But I digress. I wanted to update everyone on my progress with this month’s novel, tentatively titled The Lamanai Codex. First, I think it is a splendid name destined to capture the DaVinci Code crowd and become an international bestseller. Second, I am keeping pace with my outline, having just surpassed the 30,000-word mark with a little under half of the novel remaining to be written, meaning that I am likely to actually finish the damn thing this month.
Third, as I am one of the two Municipal Liaisons for my region, I have the honor of facilitating the novel writing experiences of some hundred-odd people, most of whom prefer to toil in obscurity and probably delete my emails without reading them. Some of them, however, are toiling right out in the open and I am usually right behind them yelling “Sprint!” in a soothing yet menacing voice. Often I have bread in my mouth because most of the write-ins (as our get-togethers are called) are held at Panera Bread, which has the finest chicken salad sandwich in all the land. The secret is grapes of the red seedless variety.
This year I’ve been writing in the third person instead of the first person, and it has been an interesting experience to say the least. I apparently lack the ability to smoothly integrate descriptive information into the action of the story and have resorted to conveying nearly everything through dialog. I sometimes feel like I am writing an unformatted screenplay instead of a novel sometimes, but I keep telling myself that I’ll fix it in December.
And so, once more into the breach, dear friends, and no I will not look up the actual quote in order to get it just right, I have more writing to do. See you all in December.
Tags: News
