NaNoWriMo

I was reading Lifehacker this morning when I saw a post titled "Write your novel this NaNoWriMo". It turns out that every November a bunch of people try to crank out a 50,000 word novel in a month. I thought to myself, "these people are crazy". But I explored it a bit and read some comments from people who've done it and it seemed like a cool experience, so I decided to sign up.

Sure, a couple of weeks ago I laid out the timeline for the next phase of my thesis work and had a bit of a "Holy crap I've got a lot of work left to do" moment, and wondered if I'd have any kind of social life in the next 10 months, but I kept reading about how rewarding it has been for the people who've done it and got excited.

Truth be told, I've had a story floating around in my head for the last few months and was considering formalizing it a bit. I never really considered writing it as a "novel" though, I actually had thoughts of making it into a game, which would have given me some good programming experience in a different domain (along with a chance to tell a story). I always put it on the back burner though, seeing it as one of those "I'll do it some time down the road" projects. I ultimately decided, though, that this writing would serve two purposes. First, it would give me a chance to formalize the story so that whenever I actually do the game it will already be hashed out. Second, in about 6-8 months I'm going to be under a serious writing crunch working on getting my thesis done, so this will be good practice for deadline-time writing.

This may prove to be an insane undertaking, and I may decide two weeks in that I just don't have the time, but right now I'm looking forward to see what I can accomplish.