Prep Materials

Aiming High at Low Standards

It was a dark and stormy night….

Actually, no. Strike that. It’s an astonishingly clear night, made quite bright by the full moon. Tonight does mark something however, and that is the rollout of this blog, dedicated to my 2007 NaNoWrimo project, which I have been preparing for over the last month and change.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is the none-too-clever shorthand for “National Novel Writing Month”. More specifically, NaNoWriMo is the name given to a 30-day collective delusion of mediocrity, shared by several thousand fantastically untalented wannabe writers. The goal? To spit up 50,000 words of novel-shaped, embarrassingly amateurish prose entirely within the confines of the calendar month of November. The prize? Absolutely nothing at all, except perhaps an unwarranted feeling of accomplishment.

Coming off a “successful” NaNoWriMo ’06, which saw me write the most overambitious, pretentious pile of verbiage conceivable by man, I am committed to reining in my delusions of quality, and ramping up my fun quotient. After virtually twenty minutes’ deliberation, I have decided to craft a pulp novel, in the style of Hammett or Chandler. Actually, that short period of consideration was only applied to the genre as a whole; I knew that I wanted to write pulp, but wasn’t sure what kind. In fact, I’ve spent the better part of October outlining a work more in the fashion of Doc Savage than the Continental Op…but after reading a fair amount of pulp over the last few weeks, I have decided that I enjoy reading pithy, first person narrative more than paeans to overblown, superhuman invinc-o-men and their similarly mighty cohorts.

Anyhow, as the welcome message says, this blog is going to be the place where I post my plot and character ideas, my outlines, and if God smiles on it, plenty of excerpts. Tune in regularly, dear readers, for the adventures of…

Well, shit…I haven’t even named him yet.