Abandon All Hope (of a ‘regular’ life)

Those of you in the know will get this. There will be shuttles this year, too. Photo from Wikimedia.

Ah, it’s November. That means that I’m writing. This year it’s another novel, just as ambitious as the last one and in fact a kind of sequel to last year’s.

Those are the plans.

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

-Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, on turning up in her nest with a plough”. 1785

Which means it’s up in the air at the time I’m writing this. (It’s not quite Halloween yet in my timestream.)

I have faith that my promised joy is winning NaNo again (this would be the fifth year) and then going on to finish another novel. Another novel I can be really, really proud of.

So there will be write-ins, there will be early morning bashing at the keyboard, late-night furies of word spew. There will be coffee and probably some whisky. (More the former than the latter.) There will be hair pulling and gnashing of teeth. All the plot issues and word choices that stump me will be crushed and driven before me. I will hear the lamentation of their women.

Well, maybe not that last bit.

Anyway, I’ll be listening to music (Hans Zimmer’s Batman and Inception soundtracks, Thomas Newman’s stuff, too) and sleeping little and eating poorly.

I guess I should say I’m not planning this, but I know this is what will happen. Four years of experience have taught me that it’s unlikely not to go that way.

Blogging will likely occur, though sporadically and quickly. Mostly just updates on word counts. There probably won’t be any excerpts this year on the blog though it’ll be tempting. Maybe just a line or two that doesn’t reveal much but which pleased me. Maybe there’ll be commentary on the Presidential election and how there’s so little respect between the two parties any more. Maybe I’ll save all that for December.

Or maybe not.

If you’re getting the sense that I’m kind of all over the place on what’s going to happen during NaNoWriMo, you’re right. All I know is that I’ve got a whopper of a story I really want to tell and that all my prep work over the last month has gone into getting that story ready to tell.

Along with all the other Confabulators and the members of the Writer’s Group, we’re going to support one another by chatting, meeting, and cajoling and pushing each other to finish the work. To get the story told.

This year’s novel has a tentative title of Organ of Record and is more science fiction than anything else. It’s not as sprawlingly star-spanning as last year’s, but it is big in its ideas. More to come on that.

So it’s November. It’s NaNoWriMo. I’m writing. I’ll say hello when I can.

Jason Arnett

Jason Arnett is a storyteller living in Kansas and writing in the plains of the fantastic. Some of his work can be found at www.jasonarnett.com