Nanowrimo: The Madness Begins

It's called National Novel Writing Month - or Nanowrimo for short. As mentioned, I will be participating in the madness of participating in this exercise. The goal is to write a 50000 word novel during the month of November. The link gives you all the details.

Over this month, I will post exerpts from the various chapters of my novel that is entitled "Best Friends". I had worked out an outline, and am now ready to write this.

As for Nanowrimo itself, I'm having some mixed feelings about the approach of this. Part of the fun seemed to be some of the get togethers that were arranged by the Nanowrimo network. I do think a lot of these get togethers are for purely social purposes - and that's fine. But I think my problem is this whole concept of the 50000 word limit. To be there is too much emphasis on the 50000 words and less emphasis on the novel. I've always said that I was going to use Nanowrimo to write the novel and go for an all out write - in other words, no worrying about the word count.

Anyway, here is an exerpt from this. Paul is an 11 year boy who will emerge as one of the three main characters when the meat of this story begins. Enjoy....more to come...

Back on the shortcut to school, Paul was taking things very cautiously. It was still very early in the morning and he could hear the leaves blowing around on what was a cool, crisp, and slightly breezy October morning. Paul would continue to work slow in a very timid manner.

All of the sudden, Paul would hear a rush of leaves blowing. It would sound like some sort of animal. Paul was suspecting it could be a rat or a raccoon, but still wasn’t sure. He was cutting behind a shopping center and knew that there were often rodents and even raccoons that were on that trail. However, Paul would get a real shock when all of a sudden a large German Shephard would emerge from the bushes along the side of the trail.

The dog seemed to be aimed right on Paul’s backpack. It was obvious that the dog smelled the muffin in his backpack. Paul suspected this and took the backpack off of him and gave it a gentle fling toward the ground. All of a sudden, the dog was scared by Paul’s action and proceeded to go into attack mode. He would quickly growl and attack him, biting him not once, but several times on his right leg. This would knock Paul down.

On a side note, I just completed my 10th trip to California. This was not a trip to LA, but another San Francisco trip as my wife and I attended a wedding. I'll post a few random thoughts on this in the upcoming days.

Today's Song: Goodnight Song by Tears For Fears

It's been a while since I put a Tears For Fears song up. One of my favorites is from the Elemental album entitled "Goodnight Song". Elemental was the first album that was done without Curt Smith. I consider it the weakest of the Tears For Fears collection, but even a weak TFF album is a good one. "Goodnight Song" is the closing song to the album. It also was a closing song that Roland Orzabal would play in concert when TFF went on without Curt Smith. It basically is a song about about a band playing the last song of the night. I guess this fits somewhat with the spirit of Nanowrimo as many will be burning up the midnight oil.