National Novel Writing Month starts in five days!

Last year I participated in (and won!) National Novel Writing Month for the first time.  I wrote a 50,000 word manuscript called Awake-- a coming of age story set at the Naval Academy.  It wasn't about me (okay, yeah it was).

So in four days I'm going to start writing my second manuscript.  I don't know what the book will be about.  I don't know where I will set it.  I do know that I can't write another coming-of-age-at-Canoe-U book (nor would I want to).  It might be about running....

The fact is that I won't know what I'm writing about until I sit down to write it.  That's how I did it last year-- in fact, I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to write about and it changed as I started writing.

You may be wondering if you could do this.  You can.  You are not too busy to write the page and a half a day required to complete 50,000 words in one month.  Believe me: I'm a father, I'm a runner, I go to those meetings a lot... I'm a busy guy.  But like they say, if you're already doing a million things, the million and first won't make that much of a difference.  So I encourage you to join me on the sordid corpse-strewn highway that is novelling.  Go to http://www.nanowrimo.org to get started.