What in the hell …

November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that your write a novel in one month, with a novel defined as 50,000 words. The web site describes the idea thus:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

That’s sort of the idea of this blog, and I like it very much. I thought of this the other day, when I saw (in the secret behind the scenes What In The Hell…? Cave, where the controls are kept) that I’ve written about 400 posts. At an average of 2 pages a post (I have no idea if that’s accurate or not), that’s 800 pages in the 2 years or whatever it is that this blog has been around. I’m not making any claims to the quality of this blog or the writing, but I do think blogging here has made me a better writer (at a minimum, I’m less anxious) - I sort of figure that doing anything a bunch of times makes you better at that thing. (I do sometimes worry that aspects of blogging may make me lazy in some aspects of my writing, but never mind that.)

I do not plan to Wri a No next Mo. I just don’t have the time and energy. I have an alternative goal for November, which is to post every day, and write at least 500 words per post. I’d like to actually do this every day. I’ll settle for an average, though (15,000 words for the month). This is also in keeping with the spirit of this blog: quantity over quality, lack of concern as to whether content is serious or no, and generally being willing to settle for less. Quotes will count for the word count.

Let’s roll.