Writing

Write write write. Writing about writing? I write in order to become better at writing? Ascribo ergo sum?

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few years writing. Usually it’s miniscule blog postings or rambling opinion pieces. I’ve been writing approximately 1,500 word essays on traffic engineering (see Talking Traffic) at two-week intervals for the past year. Occasionally I am forced (damn job!) to write reports and memos and emails and letters at work. These, of course, receive the lion’s share of my editing energy. It seems that I am able to write at least a lot, even if it is not literature.

After last year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month: November) I had given it a thought that I might participate. After all, one of the thrusts of NaNoWriMo is to write, but not to edit. You can write a great deal if you don’t go back to fix all the bits that are wrong as you go.

But why wait ’til November? I turn 35 this weekend and it’s one of my New Year’s Resolutions to write at least one (crappy) short story this year. Why not make it a crappy novel instead? There’s also no real reason to do it during November because that happens to be when Thanksgiving is; an inconvenient holiday for project completion.

No, I’m thinking that the middle of September to the middle of October is an appropriate 30 days for this potential project. It’s after Dragon*Con, so I won’t be distracted there. It’s at the middle-end of my marathon preparation, but that shouldn’t interfere any more than normal. I think that’s a good time to sit down and write something crappy and derivative. Alien elves defeat global warming after the fall of the United States or something like that. With nanotechnology and dragons, too.