Hurray, It’s a an Update! – Plus NaNoWriMo and a Panda

My poor neglected blog… <sigh>…  Well, what’s it going to to do, run away to another writer?

It’s been a busy month since I last posted. Things like Jewish High Holidays, Fantasy Football (I’m 6 and 0 going into this weekend!), the release of Wasteland 2 (I backed the Kickstarter), the Ninja-Wife saying “hey let’s go to the San Diego Zoo for a day and see koalas and pandas” (how do I resist that?), and the 40th anniversary party of the oldest homebrew club in America (they started four years before brewing beer at home became legal) are just some of the things that have gotten priority over blogging.

But you can understand why, right?

Even if they’re born in the U.S. like this little guy, they go to live in China once they reach a certain age. I choose to believe that it’s for kung fu training.

Also actual writing– of stories that I hope to sell in the not too distant future. There’s been quite a bit of that over the last several weeks. I’m a bit worried about having a particular piece of my current novel project ready for a group critique in mid-November. That should be more than plenty of time, except that I may not have time to actually work on it in November. That’s because I’m seriously considering participating in NaNoWriMo.

But I’ve been there, done that, right? That’s what that disaster-piece of a first novel is doing linked here on this blog, right?

Nope, that was completed during my own personal declared novel writing month. That month was actually March, which has one more day than November, no holidays that demand family get-togethers, and no NFL on Sundays. It’s a different kind of beast, for me at least.

Well, surely I can use NaNoWriMo to complete that dystopian western wasteland novel I’ve been slowly working on for years, right?

Nope again. Besides that the whole idea of NaNoWriMo is to start and finish a 50K-word in one month, I have too much emotional investment in that story to give it the NaNoWriMo treatment. (It’s a problem, I know.) Do it the right way calls for a new story. Something with only a bare outline will work best. Though having no outline worked out for me the last time, it also left me with a mess that I still haven’t revised into something commercially viable. I’m hoping that this time around I get a higher-quality yield for my efforts.

I do know the story that I want to give the NaNoWriMo treatment. I actually have the main characters and some important pieces of background fleshed out for it. You might call it something of a far future science fantasy romp. It should lend itself well to the brutal pacing demands of NaNoWriMo.

Writer-blogger Kristen Lamb has been churning out a series of blog articles (here, here, and here) lately on the whys and hows of participating in National Novel Writing Month. If you’re at all interested, I recommend following the links to her site and reading up.

As to whether or not I will actually attempt the mad mad marathon that is NaNoWriMo this November, I will decide for certain probably only the week before. I’ve got other things to work on in the meantime. (That may or may not include posting interesting blog content.)

This guy is here for no other reason except that I like giraffes. I mean, who doesn’t?

Oh, by the way, if you’re curious, the vanilla porter has finished conditioning in the bottles, and it tastes positively delicious. The final gravity in the fermenter was higher than I was aiming for, and so it’s only about 4.5% ABV, but that hasn’t hurt it the taste one bit.