I had a bad dream last night

I am not sure why, but it was a writing dream: I dreamt that a girl I went to high school with had written a novel, and it was being published.

Maybe I am subconsciously envious of her, because she has had a pretty successful career and overall life since high school. But she also worked pretty hard to get where she is, so it isn't like she was handed anything on a platter. But in my dream I was like, "oh, so now you are going to write a book too, bitch!"

About the Book

The working title is Jesterfest.

"Insert female protagonist name here" has received the chance of a lifetime - to be considered the best clown in the world, and it's all right in her home town. But the contestants start dying, and she is forced to join forces with a local police detective. Will she be next, will they solve the mystery in time, or will they be too busy doing the nasty?

Or something like that.

I really have to come up with some names for my characters, don't I?

New Favorite Drink

Mix one package of hot chocolate with fresh brewed coffee. Wait until the coffee cools down enought to drink it. Enjoy.

For extra chocolatey and sweet mix two packages of hot chocolate with the coffee.

So, just what is this NaNoWriMo thing, anyway?

NaNoWriMo is the cool way of saying National Novel Writing Month. From their webpage:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Collage Fun

On her webpage, Jennifer Cruise discusses the benefits of doing a collage for writing a novel - and also shares pictures of her collages.

This is inspirational pre-writing, not an art project, so it can be as minimal and as sloppy as you want. Barbara and I love messing with paper and glue and paint, so we'll build a working model of a steam engine given the chance. But if you can get the look and feel of your book by gluing half a dozen pictures together on newsprint, you'll be ready to write while we're still cutting and pasting.

So, I did my own collage, something that for me evokes the feeling of attending clown conventions:

Blog Manifesto of Purpose

... or something like that.

Here I will write about the process of writing Jesterfest - but I will not post the novel. Either it will be good enough to be published or not. If it is good enough to be published, I will try to get it published. If it isn't I won't embarrass myself and future generations of my family by posting it for the Internet.*

*Seriously, I embarrass myself enough already without proving to the world that I am wasting my time writing novels.

Regarding Suckage

Last Post I said:

It will probably suck.

As a clarification, the "it" in that sentence refers to the book and not the blog. Of course the blog will probably suck too, but that is fine with me, I have a long history of sucky blogs dating from way back in 1998 or 1999. So there.

Novel in a Month

Starting November 1st, I will be writing my novel, Jesterfest! This will chronicle my saga as I prepare and write my seminal work.

It will probably suck.