Beginning - 1 November 09

OK - its 2 November and I have started a new project. Thanks to my twitter friends @caseydamnmorgan, @asparkle, @nettagyrl, and @adelehaze who got me interested in National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo, as in www.nanowrimo.org) - I've been building up to this for the last six months, I guess - I just didn't realize it. Since it's been nearly 5 decades since I did any creative writing that 6 months has been great - I've been prolific, and the last project I was working on was a 10,000 word short story, so this was the right project at the right time. Also, racing season ended, leaving me some time to be reflective.

I have one advantage (other than old age triumphing over youthful exuberance and good looks) I've written many documents much, much longer than this, both alone and leading teams. So I've got the organization stuff down. However it is a little more difficult to write undying romantic prose than say to analyze the design of a guided missile.

But I digress - the goal here is 50,000 words by the end of the month. My schedule is simplicity itself - Sunday I laid out a story line that broke down into 20 chapters - at 2500 words apiece that gets us there. And it also means 2500 words a day for the next 20 days of the month, leaving me 10 days to polish the work, beg for reviews from my friends (or enemies) etc. Actually, I decided to split the last chapter into two, which is good since it holds the promise of a little extra in case there is a difference in word counting.

The hanger, of course, is that I have a perfectly nice consulting business, which means my time is spoken for during the day. Not to mention a soul mate, who deserves my attention, two partial weekend time commitments, thanksgiving, and maybe a sanity check here and there...It will be interesting, if nothing else. Given a plan, the rest is execution.

So here goes - at this point (actually early Monday afternoon) I am most of the way through the first chapter, along with additional organizing stuff out of the way. I'll try to post to this every day, probably at the end of the day when I'm dying to sleep...