1. NaNoWriMo draws near. Pull yourself together and commit to writing a novel in 30 days along with thousands of others worldwide. There are still forty days to sign up, so head over to their site and check it out.
2. My wife has been away this week on business and our indoor cat is busy expressing his discontent under the piano. So far Penny has not joined in.
Day two:
William: 2
Penny: 0
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Jam!
NanoWriMo started yesterday. That means I’m only one day behind. Not to worry. I have access to vast amounts of caffeine, and even though I haven’t even thought about what I plan to write about, I’m sure it’ll just spill out the moment I open the NaNoWriMo part of my brain.
Well…
Hope Springs eternal.
A moment’s brainstorming here… I have been considering putting together a book of science writing a la Matt Ridley’s Genome. His book had one essay for each of the 23 human chromosomes with the topic coming from a gene on the chromosome of that number. A little contrived, don’t you think? I wouldn’t do anything like that, right.
Ok, so I would. But since he already did that, how about one essay for every… uh. I don’t know. However, I am suddenly taken by the idea of making a book about the ages of the Earth and how life developed over time both (in some cases) causing and in (all cases) concert with geological and atmospheric changes. As always, my primary interest would be to do something of this sort that could be used to educate kids of all ages.
Whenever I think about this, I am reminded of a wonderful set of books that we had in my grandparent’s library. I think it might have been some kind of interpretation of The Origin of Species, but not following that text and with illustrations on every page. To this day, I can’t remember what book this was or find anything that satisfies my desire to provide the same sort of resource to my own son.
Well, there it is. Not a novel, but an idea. I’ll let you know where I go with this once I sit down to write tonight. Best of luck to all you other NaNoWriMo-ers out there.
National Novel 
Writing Month is November. Each year NaNoWriMo (pronounced nano-rye-mo) unites people who think it would be cool to write a novel but aren’t motivated, can’t spend years of their life on something – but can commit to some time for 30 days or need companionship to keep them going.
The goal is to start from scratch on Nov. 1 and write a 50,000 word novel by Nov. 30. Last year there was 256, 618 participants and 36, 843 winners (a winner is someone who meets the word count and has put together a coherent story, i.e. not writing nonsense). Broken down, it’s 1667 words a day over the period. I lasted about 17 days last time and wrote something on the order of 30,000 words. Let’s be honest – it was awful. But it was fun and I enjoyed being part of a larger community pursuing this goal. Every night after writing I would upload my word count and see how I was faring as compared to others in the region and across the globe.
I’m going to give it a go again this year. Maybe I’ll only make it 5 days, maybe I’ll ‘win’.
If it sounds like something you’d be interested in trying, start here. And remember, you’re supposed to try things and fail – otherwise you’re not really trying
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