New Year, New Project

Seeing as it's the new year and I'm currently unemployed, I've decided that the month of January will be a great time for me to try to write my novel in a month. I had originally hoped to do this last November, as a part of the National Novel Writing Month annual event, but with my thesis defense on 12/1/2004, I decided that writing a novel in the 30 days prior to my defense was probably a bad idea. I still stand by that decision.

Hopefully I won't be unemployed for too long; I do have bills to pay and all...but at least this gives me something productive to do while I'm unemployed and gives me another way to kill time even after I get a job.

So far, I've written about 4,000 words. My goal going into the month was to write 2,000 words a day to be able to make the 50,000 word goal with time to spare. But I've had this cold now for a few days and yesterday it just kicked my butt and left me totally wiped out, so I opted not to write. As the month progresses, I'll update here of word totals, but don't expect to read my novel until it's all written out. I really don't want feedback on it yet...I just want to let my creative juices flow.

Most of my writing this month will be done on my laptop, an HP ze1210. I really hope that the laptop makes it. This computer has a tendency to shut itself down randomly, overheat, and have mixed performance. Because of the flakieness of the computer, I also have a copy of my novel on my PalmPilot, which I sync using Documents to Go, so it will be possible to write on my Palm if the computer really goes nuts one day. Of course, if I end up doing most of my writing on the Palm (a PalmOne Tungsten C), I may get one of the keyboards for it instead of trying to write with Grafitti2 or the thumb board. So we'll see how that goes...

If you're interested in trying to write a novel in a month, you might want to check out Chris Baty's "No Plot? No Problem!" It's the book I've used to help me plan my novel and gather inspiration and motivation to write.

So with that, Happy New Year to everybody! I'm off to try to write a bit before going to PT...