Saturday, October 18, 2003
Welcome to my FOURTH blog on the Internet!!! I just saved all of the entries from my first blog ever on Diary-X, and currently keep a blog at Diaryland, with a recipe blog here at Blogger - there's a link from my journal mentioned above.
I was websurfing, looking at journals, yesterday, when I came across the icon for National Novel Writing Month - or NaNoWriMo. I was (am) intrigued. Here is the explanation, in case you are too lazy to go there:
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.
Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: Sign ups begin around October 1, 2003. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, the 50,000-word mark must be reached by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
Sounds pretty scary! I spend a lot of time on the internet, maintaining the blogs I have already, but will have to neglect those for a while in order to do this. I have two weeks to prepare! There's a great Tips and Strategies link, so I have some ideas for how to prepare:
1. Dig out all of my souvenirs from that year. It's a lot, too. I think that there is a journal, letters from home, letters to my grandparents that I recuperated after their death, pictures, a scrapbook? It's all somewhere!
2. I may still have the tattered little cassette that I made from the 45's I brought back. I have to check. If not, I may attempt to find some of those songs online... There are American hits, too - a friend used to send me tapes of the top 40 that she got from the radio. Oh, and Chris de Burgh - my roommate's fave!
3. I have one friend left that I am in touch with from that time. He lives in Japan. I will be writing about him, so I don't know if I will tell him about it or not... On the other hand, he might tweak my memory about stuff.
4. I don't want to "overplan" but I could make a character web, to remind myself of everyone in France and at home. I also may make a timeline of events, so that I don't forget any of the places we visited.
5. I plan on breaking this down into pieces. I was there for 10 months, so 3 days per month seems reasonable. Of course, some things will need more time than others.
If you plan on following my progress on this, please pray for me to be consistent and to follow through. I am notorious for losing interest halfway through a project. I don't know how this will go!
I was websurfing, looking at journals, yesterday, when I came across the icon for National Novel Writing Month - or NaNoWriMo. I was (am) intrigued. Here is the explanation, in case you are too lazy to go there:
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.
Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: Sign ups begin around October 1, 2003. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, the 50,000-word mark must be reached by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
Sounds pretty scary! I spend a lot of time on the internet, maintaining the blogs I have already, but will have to neglect those for a while in order to do this. I have two weeks to prepare! There's a great Tips and Strategies link, so I have some ideas for how to prepare:
1. Dig out all of my souvenirs from that year. It's a lot, too. I think that there is a journal, letters from home, letters to my grandparents that I recuperated after their death, pictures, a scrapbook? It's all somewhere!
2. I may still have the tattered little cassette that I made from the 45's I brought back. I have to check. If not, I may attempt to find some of those songs online... There are American hits, too - a friend used to send me tapes of the top 40 that she got from the radio. Oh, and Chris de Burgh - my roommate's fave!
3. I have one friend left that I am in touch with from that time. He lives in Japan. I will be writing about him, so I don't know if I will tell him about it or not... On the other hand, he might tweak my memory about stuff.
4. I don't want to "overplan" but I could make a character web, to remind myself of everyone in France and at home. I also may make a timeline of events, so that I don't forget any of the places we visited.
5. I plan on breaking this down into pieces. I was there for 10 months, so 3 days per month seems reasonable. Of course, some things will need more time than others.
If you plan on following my progress on this, please pray for me to be consistent and to follow through. I am notorious for losing interest halfway through a project. I don't know how this will go!
