In the beginning...

October has come again and that means it is only a few short weeks until once again I embark on the insanity that is Nanowrimo. This blog is going to be my place to trace my preparations throughout the month and then rant and rave across November about my success’ and my failures. After that point this may fade from activity or perhaps I might change it into something new and carry on.

So today, for those who don’t already know I’m going to talk about what Nanowrimo is. Nanowrimo is a sort of an anacronym for ‘National Novel Writing Month’. The basic idea behind it is that the fundamentally hardest part about actually writing a novel is doing it - that it is one of those pipe dreams that you will get to one day when you have the time. But the truth is that for most of us we never find ourselves with a huge chunk of time that just screams WRITE!! All of our lives are busy with so many different things that it just gets put off until someday comes around. So the idea is that just getting down and writing, even if it is pure crap, is better than waiting for some undefined point in the future. And that once we have managed this a couple times you find that you have learned the skills of making the time to write even when you are busy. So some thousands of crazy people from all over the world sit down once a year to madly scramble out 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s tough and draining but the reason we all do it together is that the rest can provide us the support we need when it is getting tough and our enthusiasm can buoy them through when we are on a roll.

I had heard about this before but never with some details, but then James Brown mentioned it on his blog last year and I went and browsed around their site and found myself getting caught up in the enthusiasm of doing this. I love writing but mostly stopped doing it when I got out of school and found that I no longer had many incredibly boring hours each day to fill with looking busy and nothing better to do with them than satisfy my imagination. Between school, work, friends, and fun it seemed that writing had slipped entirely off my raidar - Nanowrimo gives me a month every year to indulge my cravings for authorial power and something to dream, brag, and talk about the rest of the year.

Welcome to the Neon Brown Blues.