Bak Sun Ritin Novul

Sheesh, has it only been a week since I joined up? Somehow I feel as though I've been lurking around this site for at least a month. But no, there it is on my profile; I joined on October 22nd, 2010. So just nine days; in that time I've introduced myself, sent FRs to the 2o2p Reach tags and posted on a few threads. Just now I saw another thread where someone told a fellow newbie how he was meant to use the Reach tags, which made the penny finally drop - I'm meant to use it to FR fellow Reach players. Right!

Which is horrid timing, because now I'm stepping out.

Not forever, though, and definitely no longer than a month; I should be browsing 2o2P and sending the odd FR no later than December 1st. But for the month of November, I've promised myself no going near the Xbox 360 and just the bare minimum of browsing.

I can't remember where or when I first heard of the odd acronym, NaNoWriMo. A few years ago, I think; folks on the RPG.net Forums may have mentioned it once or twice. Lately, though, Mur Lafferty of the awesome podcast I Should Be Writing has mentioned it a lot, and a friend at the local writers' group I joined a few months back - yes, I'm a wannabe writer - asked whether I was going to be in.

At first I figured I'd probably give it a miss. Unlike the semi-passive task of growing a moustache, NaNoWriMo - otherwise known as the National Novel Writing Month - requires its participants to write the first draft of a 50,000-word novel. That means writing one thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven (rounding up) words per day. Now, if I'm lucky, I can crank out 500 words in my midday break at work once I've eaten, which is thirty to forty minutes. At that kind of speed, I'd need to dedicate around two hours, twenty minutes every day to writing. That's a pretty big ask.

However, as October drew to a close, I found myself... well, keen. See, I want to get serious about writing fiction; I want to get into the habit of cranking out 1,000 words a day, and blitzing through 167% of that target in a month would be a good way to get into that habit.

I have additional incentive. Scrivener is a Mac application that I've been hearing good things about lately; a lot of creative-types recommend it as a great aid to writing. Were MacBooks as affordable as the Acer netbook I bought myself a couple of months ago, I'd have bought Scrivener and installed it in a heartbeat.

However, Scrivener developers Literature and Latte have just released a beta version of Scrivener for Windows, due to be released in early 2011. They're offering NaNoWriMo participants a deal: Complete your 50,000 words by November 30th and they'll sell you Scrivener for Windows at 50% off when they release it..

So, I've signed up on the NaNoWriMo website and downloaded the beta on my desktop and my netboook. The next question is: What the hell am I going to write 50,000 words about? Well, it has to be something I'd enjoy writing, like action and adventure with big and / or cool machines lots of high tech toys to play with.

Then it hit me: The War of the Worlds. It's got everything: Blood-sucking alien overlords, towering war machines and searing death rays. I've wanted to build my own castles in H. G. Wells' sandpit ever since Jeff Wayne's Musical Version hipped me to the book, and I'm gonna have me some fun with it now. It's going to be an alternate present where we've integrated the technology the Martians left behind after the last invasion, but the Martians return with some new tricks of their own.

Between now and November 1st I'm going to put an outline together; I know how I want it to end, so I can work backward from there, see what situations I need to have happen to get to the end and what sort of people would be in those situations. If you're keen on following my progress, keep an eye on my Twitter feed and NaNoWriMo profile.

You can also sponsor me. Proceeds raised by NaNoWriMo go to offset the costs of running it and the organisation's charity, the Young Writers Program, bringing arts education to schoolkids in month-long programmes.

Wish me luck, and I hope to catch up with you all on the forums and in Reach once my 50,000 words are written!