I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. This isn’t unusual; I’ve tried in years past and it’s been an epic fail on the level of Dane Cook stand up and the “Charlie’s Angels” remake. But I’m giving it another go this year, and I’m blaming Chuck Wendig, Lee Goldberg, and my wife’s Kindle.
This past year has found me trying to amp my writing up with silly little things like, oh, actually writing , and then finishing it, silly things like that. That includes the quintessential writerly thing of writing a novel. I’m on Round Two so far (Round One was a crime novel that I plan on revisiting), this time the ever-popular urban fantasy novel.
And I’ve been following a few writers on the Internet. Guys like Chuck Wendig are creating a fascinating on-line community, full of wit and fun and attitude. Lee Goldberg has been one of the biggest proponents of the change from legacy publishing to e-books, and his recent deal with Amazon.com on the “Dead Man” novels launching the site’s 47North imprint is a damn cool step forward with genre e-books. Along with folks like J.A. Konrath, John Locke, and Michael Prescott are finding amazing success in the e-book realm.
This isn’t where I say I plan on finding fortune and fame through e-books. There’s an incredible amount of dreck finding its way onto a variety of e-readers, and I don’t know that I want to be among those just slopping whatever at an unsuspecting public at 99 cents a p. What I do want is to write something good that people enjoy.
So NaNoWriMo becomes my excuse for actually writing and finishing a book. I’m being a monumental fool by deciding that my NaNoWriMo novel is the second book in a series where I haven’t even finished the first one. By November I hope to be midway through the first book and feeling good to start the second.
This blog is coming back because I need it to. It keeps me honest, gives me somewhere to post up my progress a la Cherie Priest, and lets me occasionally vent about whatever stupidity is pissing me off at that particular moment. I’ve had a few really great moments on this blog (making the IMDb hitlist and getting 4K in hits was one of ‘em; interviewing Lee Goldberg was another), and I’d like to keep some of that going on a more consistent basis.
So let’s where this goes, and see if I actually finish the damn thing.
