Yeah, it’s that time of year again. National Novel-Writing Month. The time when I go in completely blind and come out with a massive word count worthy of Mordor.

By the way, that’s how you know something is epic…if it’s worthy of Mordor. Keep that in mind next time you feel like half-assing anything. You know you want to be worthy of Mordor or it’s not worth doing. Right?

Every year I see a lot of writers going through massive amounts of prep for this day. They’re drawing up outlines and character profiles, doing some autowriting exercises, and generally getting a grasp on the story they want to tackle this time around. While I do (most of the time) engage in these typical writer activities before I begin a story, with NaNo I tend to just balls-out. There’s something about the threat of a very short deadline and word count that makes me want to see what my brain can squeeze out all on its own. My end product may not be Shakespeare, but more often than not it’s something I probably wouldn’t have achieved quite so well if I’d planned ahead of time.

I’m not saying folks are silly for doing NaNo prep. Some people really need that structure to be able to effectively tell a story. If they don’t have a way to connect the dots, they run into a lot of writer’s block and choke on their own panic. I know what that’s like; I’ve experienced both with and without pre-writing prep. Sucks balls. So all kinds of power to folks who prep for NaNo. Y’all are probably the same folks who attend all the area meetups and write-ins.

I’d love to join a write-in one of these years even though I am positive that it would prove disastrous. Being that I am generally a soloist when it comes to my writing, I’m not sure how that would go down in the grand scheme of things. I think being surrounded by that many people oozing stress over word counts and verb-tense agreement would probably slow my roll immensely. I’ll just send a basket of “good luck!” cookies in my place.

So best wishes to all my fellow crazy writers. Let’s collectively break a leg! Or…wait, do writers even have their own version of wishing someone luck? I’m not so sure I want to break a leg. How about “Break a pencil!” Well. That’d work if people still wrote by hand. And I sure as hell don’t want to wish that anyone breaks their keyboard. Um. Fuck it. See you at the finish line.

It’s that time of year again. Today marks the kickoff of National Novel-Writing Month 2009, affectionately known to us nutty participants as NaNoWriMo, or to the rest of the world as “You’re doing what? Why?”

I have three separate story ideas from which I hope to cull my entry this year. We’ll see how far I get on each one. I don’t plan on writing all three of them simultaneously, though if I do end up going that route, you’ll know by my uncontrollable babbling, drooling, and pants-wetting.

This year I’ve actually acquired a group of fellow participants with whom I can commiserate and celebrate and perhaps even masturbate. NO. HA! Kidding! I swear! No, really. Don’t take me seriously. It’s still early and my first cup of coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. Aren’t you glad I came straight to my blog rather than work on my novel? No? Yeah, I can understand that.

I look forward to a day when I can actually do NaNo and not have anything else to do except my day job. No festival planning or schoolwork or family meetups. Not sure how far into the future that day currently is, but I’d like to pretend it’s next fall. Just to increase this year’s survival rate a bit more.

So in honor of NaNo ’09, I’ve loaded this snazzy new template for the month. I hate it more than life itself and I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up skullfucking the author of it when all is said and done, just to work out my pissed-off CSS aggressions. It’s broken nine ways from Tuesday, and I’ll probably spend any free time I have this month trying to rewrite the code from scratch, just in time for a holidays template change in December. Hooray for futility. At any rate, it’s still pretty to look at, and I don’t feel like digging through another ten crappy free CSS sites to get a replacement. Just accept the mismatched fonts and lopsided layout and I’ll reward you with handjobs and pie.

I promise.

Maybe.

……..