I finally got per­suaded into doing a NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t speak Inter­net hip­ster, this is just a fancy way of say­ing I got per­suaded into writ­ing my own novel, spe­cific­ally a 50000-​​word novel within the month of November.

It may seem like a silly idea con­sid­er­ing I have a lot of work to do, not to men­tion a con­fer­ence to go to at the end of this week. Doing 1667 words a day isn’t really that bad, though, con­sid­er­ing writ­ing comes pretty eas­ily for me. I prob­ably write more than that each day just in emails. Whether I can write any­thing good seems to be entirely beside the point: NaNoWriMo is about noth­ing if not quant­ity over quality.

Any­way I’m sud­denly real­iz­ing how ser­i­ously people take this NaNoWriMo busi­ness. I thought it was a cas­ual way to encour­age people to write, but no: it’s very ser­i­ous busi­ness, strict and organ­ized. If you start writ­ing before Novem­ber 1, for instance, you’re a cheater! I’m not sure how the tim­ing of things will play con­sid­er­ing I’m fly­ing to Europe on the even­ing of Octo­ber 31 North Amer­ican time, which is very early morn­ing Novem­ber 1 European time. Pre­sum­ably I won’t be able to write unless it hap­pens to be mid­night in the time zone dir­ectly under where my plane hap­pens to be? I might just go crazy and start writ­ing as soon as I get on the plane, which would be past mid­night des­tin­a­tion time, just to protest the silly rules.

I’ve also heard there are ways to get around these rules, to cheat without being labelled a cheater. You can work on your novel, for instance, so long as you don’t write any prose. I don’t know how that would work out if your novel con­sisted of a lot of poetry; maybe that’s a grey area. Maybe you could write some sen­tences without the verbs in an attempt to not have it count as “prose”. If you think I’m being pedantic try­ing to work around the rules these ways, just look at an example of what other people have thought up.

Since this is my first NaNoWriMo I’m going to try to keep the cheat­ing to a min­imum — except­ing that bit about me writ­ing on the plane, pos­sibly an hour or two before mid­night, depend­ing on which time zone you con­sider my plane to be in — and stick with the spirit of the com­pet­i­tion. Side note: after scour­ing the site I can’t even fig­ure out why this is framed as a com­pet­i­tion or under what con­di­tions someone might win. Suf­fice it to say, no mat­ter how they’re pick­ing win­ners, I won’t be one, so I’m just going to write a novel and have some fun with it.

My idea so far is a world very much like our own, but where there’s another sur­viv­ing spe­cies of the genus homo. It will likely even be another sub­spe­cies of the spe­cies homo sapi­ens. The point is we (us, humans) have some other “race” which is like us, but not actu­ally us. They don’t have the cap­ab­il­ity for verbal speech like we do, for instance. I sup­pose nom­in­ally it could be con­sidered “steam­punk” since it’s set in essen­tially our world in the near past, but with a dif­fer­ent timeline for social and tech­no­lo­gical pro­gress. I think it will be set in the early 20th cen­tury so that I don’t have to deal with a totally global world and at the same time glob­al­iz­a­tion is start­ing to become an issue in people’s minds. Hav­ing it in the recent past also solves the prob­lem of me try­ing to write about things I know noth­ing about.

So I’ve star­ted flesh­ing out the world and even a couple char­ac­ters so far. I have some vague ideas for major plot points which will prob­ably be thrown out com­pletely once I start writ­ing and give up any semb­lance of fol­low­ing a plan.

On a tech­nical note, a lot of this is just an excuse for me to try out LaTeX’s book class. I don’t know how many NaNoWriMo-​​ers use LaTeX — not nearly enough, how­ever many it is — but thank­fully the word count veri­fier seems to work nicely with plain text and con­sequently detex. I tip my hat to the NaNoWriMo people for not going out of their way to spread the evil through this world that is the word pro­cessor. Also I’m pretty sure in my fic­tional world there will be no word pro­cessors, only type­set­ters. How do you like that, Microsoft?

In spite of my overly cyn­ical tone at the start of this entry, I think NaNoWriMo is pretty slick. I won’t pre­tend to under­stand the emphasis they put on fol­low­ing rules, or why they have rules at all, but I’ll fol­low them non­ethe­less. I’m pretty excited for it.

I finally got persuaded into doing a NaNoWriMo. For those who don't speak Internet hipster, this is just a fancy way of saying I got persuaded into writing my own novel, specifically a 50000-word novel within the month of November. It may seem like a silly idea considering I have a lot of work to ...