NaNoWriMo & Other Musings

Current word count: 2102

This month is National Novel Writing Month!

"National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30."

So, the idea is to become a novelist in one month.
Write now, polish later.
Not a very bad proposition, even though I remain skeptical. Should novels be written in such a manner, like a newspaper article down whose neck a vicious editor is breathing. I think of it the same way I'd think of you using a style guide to write a novel.

Novels are meant to be bastions of artistic freedom. Let the muse and the word take the lead.

But, having said that, I will be participating in NaNoWriMo. At least this year.
Why?
Because I see it as a chance to recoup my heartrending losses. This will be my attempt, under the not-so-palatable influence of an external factor, to push my new novel back to 57,000 words this month.

As I told you earlier, I will not be resuming work on the affected novel. Not for now. I am too traumatised to face it. I have therefore started work on a sequel to it, the second in what I hope will be a trilogy. (That is all I shall tell you about it for now! Novels are meant to be written, not talked about, seen, not heard!)

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I mentioned in an earlier post how I have been researching writers' blogs to see how they do it. My conclusion is this: Some writers should NOT be blogging. When a blog becomes a shameless personal-promotional tool, fit only for cataloguing trips to credit-crunched chiropractors, and bouts of bleary-eyed bargaining at designer-shops, it is time for the writer to pull the plugs and find work somewhere else, in Reality TV or something like that.

Alas, one out of every 3 writerly blogs I come across falls into this category. Next thing the writer will become the hero of his own fiction!

There are far more important things for a blogger to consider, like this brilliant question here

And this here, which i stumbled upon only recently would be quite close to one of my ideas of the perfect writing blog - with tips and insightful how-tos, writers' obituaries, snippets of writing and the writing life...

Finally, before I sign out (I'm back at the Town Hall Library, so there's no evil-faced internet-monitor librarian dragonfiring into my self-esteem and my composure), here's a link to the only surviving recording of the author Virginia Woolf

Someday, when I get more tech-savvy, I would like to put up recordings of my readings from my juvenilia and post-juvenilia. I have a feeling that when I'm off this earth, they might be the only stuff from me that will survive, the only evidence that a man called Desiderus walked the face of the earth.
Such a shame. To think that I HATE the sound of my own voice, yet cannot shake off the feeling that it is the only part of me that will survive, my "voice-mail for an unborn generation", to borrow the words of the Late Great African poet, Omo Alagbede

PS. In my next post I will speak about my writing philosophy and process, attempt to shed more light on my ambitions in the field of literary crime-fiction, crime written about in a way that would make a Nobel Prize Judge (for Literature) take a second, somewhat envying, look...