…for this important announcement.

Short version : this blog, as it is right now, is going to be taking a break.

Why? Because I will be participating in this year’s National Novel Writing Month, or as it’s known at home, NaNoWriMo. That means I will be attempting to write a fifty thousand word novel in just thirty days.

Crazy, I know. But I am the guy who wrote a million words in eleven months, so, you know…. I do crazy.

In fact, I think crazy goals motivate me a lot better than sane, reasonable, well thought out goals.

After all, if your goals are sane and normal, then all you have to show for achieving them is a sane and normal accomplishment. Yawn city, man!

But if you give yourself a wild and crazy goal, then you can know that should you pull it off, you will able to say “hey, guess what? I did this amazingly wild thing!” and that, my friends, kicks ass.

So, NaNoWriMo time. I have my starting point and a few characters sketched out in my mind, and a very vague idea of what my end point will be, but otherwise, I will be performing without a net. A lot of people write detailed outlines before they go NaNoWriMo, and hey, whatever works for you is fine by me.

But from my own point of view, starting off knowing more or less everything you are going to do sounds very dull. I am quite excited about the prospect of learning what I am writing while I write it. Who knows where I will end up? I know a lot of the ingredients, but I don’t know how the recipe will turn out.

That, to me, is part of the fun. Who knows, perhaps I will get partway into the month and say “Oh crap, I have no idea what to do next, I really wish I had done that outline thing!”, and I will be cursing myself for being such a smug jackass at this point in the game.

But that is a chance I am willing to take. I see this following month of hardcore writing as an adventure, and all adventures involve risk. I am venturing out into the unknown to see what I can find/create there, and I am quite excited at the prospect.

And sometimes, the most important thing in the world is maintaining your enthusiasm, regardless of other seemingly sane and rational considerations.

Now it might seem like the guy who wrote around three thousand words a day for eleven months will have no problem writing the necessary 1,667 words a day for NaNoWriMo.

But I have never written long fiction before. And even if that were not true, those 1,667 words per day will be 1,667 words of fiction, and fiction take a hell of a lot more out of me than blogging, commentary, or even editorial content. With fiction, you have to imagine an entire world and everything that happens in it, and that takes a hell of a lot more mental energy than just writing down my thoughts.

Throw in the effort it takes to keep all the continuity in mind, plus the characters’ personalities, plot histor,y background, you name it…. it is a heck of a mental task.

So this will be a real challenge. I hope that by the end of it, I will have developed stronger mental muscles for this kind of heavy lifting, and will as a consequence be a better, more focused, more ambitious writer when all this is said and done.

But at the very least,I will be able to say “I conquered NaNoWriMo! I wrote a book!” and that will be a pretty good feeling, I should hope.

I will post each daily slice of my novel to this website, and also crosspost it to the official NaNoWriMo website, under my full legal name.

Most likely, I will also be posting the occasional thing to this space as I have been doing for all this year, but without the kind of longer form entries I have been doing. I will just toss you nice folks a link or some thoughts on the news or whatever when I feel I can spare the energy. No promises.

And if you miss my unique and even occasionally stable non-fiction voice, remember, it will only be a month, and everything will go back to normal at least till the New Year.

After that, well who knows? Maybe I will have a novel to sell.