My regular readers* may have notice that I’ve been quite quiet over the past couple of weeks.  As it turns out, I’m currently fighting my way through National Novel Writing Month!

For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is an annual novel-writing event, in which participants are challenged to finish a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November.  The focus is on productivity: the writing that is produced will likely be on average pretty crappy, but at the end the author will actually have a draft that they can hone and refine.  There’s no time to have writer’s block, or get hung up on rewrites; the author has to just go where the story takes them!

I’ve tried and succeeded at NaNoWriMo two times before, once unofficially in March of 2006 and once officially in 2007; I chronicled my 2007 victory here.  This year is much rougher, because I’m so much more busy than I have been thanks to being a tenured faculty member.  I still really wanted to give it a go, however, since I’d like to try and publish at least one novel in my lifetime!**

So my posts will be very light this month, since I’ve got to write 1700 words a day to stay on pace, and that’s taking up most of my evening free time.  You can keep track of my progress here, however; I’m almost up to the half-way point as of this writing.

I’ve got lots of interesting stuff to post about in the near future, and a few special projects in the works; I’ll be back to full blog speed in December!

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* I’m assuming I still have regular readers…

** I’ve been writing fiction on and off since I was in the 4th grade; one of these days I’ll have to post some of those early stories, which I still have.