Not A Blog™

I had to look back over my October posts for the past two years, in order that I might not repeat myself when discussing this annual subject. I’ll probably repeat myself anyway, since I tend to repeat myself regarding almost everything. That being said, I’ll probably repeat myself anyway.

The subject I’m talking about is, of course, National Novel Writing Month—upon us once again, mere weeks away. I’ll bet you’ve already prepared yourself for a month without the Not A Blog™, a diffcult prospect to be sure, but one which, as in years past, you’ll survive. Unless you were one of those ones who didn’t make it. Survival of the fittest, you know.

But your plans may be for naught. You see, I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to be doing this year’s Nanowrimo. A shocking reveal? Maybe, but not entirely unwarrented. I’ve reached a point now where it’s no longer this crazy scheme for writing a novel in a month, either for me or for the people who know me. Rather, it’s this thing I do which reportedly takes up a lot of my time, and reportedly generates an entire book, however the book is never seen by any man, and so the entire endeavor is called into question. The “slinking off to write” isn’t even a noticable trend in my life because I prefer to spend so much time alone anyway. I just divert some of the time I would spend doing other stuff—writing this, for example—to the novel. I know precisely how long I need to write to hit the 1,667 word-per-day mark. I very often take less time than that, even, and so the novel gets done. Yes, I get bogged down along the way and stuff crops up, but, really, it’s no longer a challenge.

This is announcement follows three Nano wins out of three attempts netting me three almost-done novels (two of dubious quality; one I actually like); and an article about me in the newspaper. That was bizarre, let me tell you. At least my head shot looked decent, seeing as how I took the photo myself in my studio at work and spent a good hour in Photoshop cleaning up my face (and that was a rush job). It was, dare I say, professional looking.

But I digress. The point is that my acquaintences in general expect that I’ll be writing a novel again next month, but the notion no longer holds interest for me. I did it, no suprises. It’s now busy work. I don’t do anything with the novels anyway. Unless…

I just might do Nanowrimo after all, but I think I’ll be bending the rules a bit. According to the rules on their website, you may not write one word fifty thousand times, nor can you write a screenplay. However, there is no mention of nonfiction, and more importantly, there is no mention of plotless nonfiction. I’m thinking of the general humor stylings of Mike Nelson, James Lileks, Maddox, and so on. These authors have all published books with no plot. I’ve more or less resigned to the idea that if I publish at all, my first book will be nonfiction meanderings of thought—not unlike this Not A Blog™, come to think of it.

Along these same lines, I’ve had two people ask me why I don’t just take all the stuff I wrote for the Not A Blog™ and throw it in a book. Aside from the fact that half my posts consist of “No post today!”, this is not a bad idea.

Can I do this for a month? Daily? The task is strangly appealing, similar to the appeal of the very first Nanowrimo, whence I was prepared to dive into the unknown. This is exactly what I need: to define my own restrictions in order to inject the challenge back into the month of November.

The advantages: many. For one thing, even if fully half the book sucks (note to self: it will), it would be a huge jump start on an actual self-publishable novel book. And let’s be honest, here. Left to my own devices, I would never write this much in addition to the Not A Blog™. I can barely write enough to keep up with the short stories I’m supposed to be reading to the writer’s group I attend. And those generally don’t get posted to the blog.

Secondly, it’s the sort of thing I already do. Nothing different there. But I’ll need a theme and an outline. When writing a plotfull book (that is, a book with a plot), the characters take over at about word 7,842 and you throw your carefully laid plot out the window because you won’t be using it anymore. This is good for me, because I don’t usually have much a plot to begin with. Last year I went into the novel with the full intention of letting my characters do the heavy lifting, and it actually worked. The downside was that my characters liked to talk a lot, so I had to occasionally force plot points on them, but I got through with zero pre-planning and the novel, while not great, was decent. And fifty thousand words.

But without characters to fall back on, I need to define a series of topics I can write about. Ideally, I’ll have more than 50k words worth, but it’s easy enough to figure, regardless. Ten topics? Five thousand words a piece. Simple.

Yes, I do believe this is what I will attempt to accomplish during November. The point of Nanowrimo is to get you writing. That actually worked for me. I now write whereas I hadn’t previously. Mission accomplished. But now I’m taking it to the next lev—not using that cliche because I despise it. I’m thinking outside the b—No. Um. I’m doing something different this year, and I’m excited about it.

And if that doesn’t fit in someone’s tidy set of rules, tough beans. I will be writing 50k words in November, regardless of whether those words, collectively, contain a plot.

I guess that means you will have to put up with a month of no Not A Blog™. So it goes.

-Ted