Count Me In

So I was on the Idler forum yesterday and someone mentioned the National Novel Writing Month in America, and an annual event where people sign up to a writing marathon to produce 50,000 words of novel between the 1st November and the 30th.

I'm far too busy, of course, but this works out at 1,500 words a day, which takes me about an hour or so to do. So what the hell. I've often said that one of the biggest barriers to my writing is that I hate sitting at the keyboard turning out crap. This is one of the (many) reasons why I don't write very much, and the main reason why I tend not to do perhaps as much editing as I ought to. The challenge of churning out 50k over thirty days will, I hope, lead to a slightly less precious attitude to my output, and it'll also bring those high numbers within an achievable reach. So, yes, basically, I'm doing it.

I've set down certain strategies, basing the central character to some extent on myself (he's a temp in London) , and using the various pursuits I followed on my week between assignments to populate the plot. Added to that will be a Dickian strangeness that is the main guts of the novel, but I've not quite worked out what that's all about yet, which is part of the fun.

I'm 1550 words into it so far, and hope to build up a decent amount of slack in the next couple of days so that I can spend some time editing what I've done and working out a bit more of the plot. The story is going to be some sort of conspiracy type affair, but with the emphasis on big Government as a self-serving meta-consciousness. I've also arbitrarily made the decision for each day's writing to mirror palindromically, so in the first 1550 words, for instance, there features the word balloon, and so a balloon will appear in the closing 1550 words.

It will also be people with characters that are named after my various online chums. If that's you, ask me for inclusion.