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It is mid-October already.  Mid-October!

This means a variety of pleasant and not-so-pleasant things:

1.  That, since I can’t remember what in the world I was doing at the beginning of October, I must be getting… (I don’t want to use the o-word or the s-word or the A-word)…. forgetful.

2.  Leaves must have already changed in Upstate New York, or even fallen.  ( I seem to have some vague memory of red and yellow.  Is that where I was a couple of those lost days?)

3.  Your last chance for last year’s tax return is about to expire.  (Oops!)

4.  Didn’t the World Series use to be over by now?

5.  I’m not going to say anything about upcoming mid-term elections.  (I’d like this to be post to be cheerful.)

6.  Nanowrimo–National Novel Writing Month (the month of November) is just around the corner!

Nanowrimo was the conception of Chris Baty, a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, who realized in a brainstorm that the one thing non-professional writers lack that professional writers have is a deadline.  He also postulated that the imposition of a deadline (a firm deadline, even if arbitrary) could be an important step to blocking writer’s block, i.e. getting the old fingers/pen/keyboard working.  Fast.

Nanowrimo gives would-be writers a very public start date and end date–November 1 to November 30–to write a novel of approximately 175 pages (50,000 words).

The goal (remember you only have a month!) is quantity.

I urge all of you to go to the Nanowrimo website–www.nanowrimo.org–to learn more about this endeavor/torture.  All I can say is that if you can commit to it, it’s a lot of fun/torture.  There is something wonderful/torturous about writing madly with the virtual company of thousands of other crazed/tortured people, all of you racking your brains and up your word count.  (Yes, I too can sense a theme developing.)

I haven’t quite decided how to handle the blog this November.  There’s the temptation to post current Nanowrimo output, but I will resist that.  If you are writing a novel in a month, you need to be free to be ridiculous.    (There’s a limit to how much torture can be borne!)

More soon.