Rumours of my death are greatly celebrated....

Well, mostly by close friends and family, but follow along.

Today was official kick-off day for NaNoWriMo.  Well, actually, it was last night at local midnight time.  And if you're not a writer, or you are and living under an inkwell, then you might not know that this oddly-difficult to type acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month.  The idea is to get you to park your ass in a chair, wipe the potato chip grease from your fingers, place them over the keys and PUSH.  You write 50,000 words (and to my credit, the rules didn't really say they had to be in any specific order) in 30 days, which roughly comes up to be 1,666 words each day.



Steve Warburton as Jack Ryan O'Hanlan
Original design copyright (c) Carla René.
2010.  All rights reserved.

 About 30-minutes ago, I finished chapter one of my NaNoWriMo novel, entitled, A Most Devout Coward.  I always push for about 2,500 average words for each chapter, give or take 2-300 in either direction.

On a side note, comedy-writing legend John Vorhaus, loved my comedic premise when I ran it by him two weeks ago, and has enthusiastically agreed to read the finished MS and offer me a blurb.  I'm so excited.  Might try and snake a forward out of him while I'm taking advantage of his talents.

I had taken great pains to plot this novel over the last month (while getting my advanced readers' copies of The Gaslight Journal out to my beta readers) and to outline it in great detail.

And yet at 5 p.m. when I sat down to actually write, aside from the opening scene of my protagonist in a diner, I had no clue how I would arrive at the only other scene I knew--the last, with him in the interrogation room at the 12th Precinct.

So.  Day one down, and twenty-nine more to go.  But I think I'll be fine.  I cranked out 2,600 pages every day of Gaslight and had it finished in 6 weeks, so I'm not worried about meeting my quota.

But come back tomorrow.  I may be drooling into my keyboard, screaming for coffee that I don't have, and certain I've seen D.B. Cooper at the local Piggy Wiggly in my sleep-deprivation.

(But I'm having a fantastic ride!)

P.S.--if you or anyone you know is interested in bettering your comedy-writing skills, and you're a member of either Goodreads.com or Shelfari.com, then do a group search my newly-formed comedy writing group, called Writing With My Colored Pencil.  Group name is the same for both.

I started both of these groups, because lately I've been hearing a lot of beginning and seasoned writers say things like, "I wish I were funnier," or, "I wish I knew how to write comedy."  We will be discussing all sorts of comedy writing tools that will make you funnier, even if you don't think you are.  And let's face it:  humour is one thing we all have in common, and apart from sex, it's the one thing that is proven to sell.