National Novel Writing Month 2010 is underway.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the annual November challenge to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days, began at midnight last night. It's a huge event -- last year, over 167,000 people entered, logged 2.4 billion words, and over 32,000 won, where the sole criterion for "winning" is having enough words on the page before midnight on November 30.

Long-time readers will recall that I participated last year and successfully finished a first draft just under the wire. This year, I'm going after the prize again, although I will admit, I'll be a bit distracted until we get past Election Day.

But I have an outline: two years ago, during my summer writing workshop (Hi, Gibraltar Point peeps!) I produced an outline for a Young Adult (YA) science fiction novel about a school for super-genius children hidden in a fold of time during World War II.

So this year, I'm writing "Across the Fourth World"...

"Concepts of 'time' and 'matter' are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all...but depend upon the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed."
    —Benjamin Lee Whorf
    Language, Thought, and Reality

Chapter One: A simple one-room schoolhouse

 "Usually, it happens right about here."
 Twelve-year-old J.D. Elegbe turned back from the railing of the antique ferry to see who had spoken.
 "What?" he said, then caught himself. "Excuse me?"
 The girl, who looked like she might be a year or two older, was absorbed in an iPhone game and hadn't even taken her headphones off. She glanced up briefly and nodded for him to look.
Out ahead of the boat was a choppy expanse of Narragansett Bay and the outline of Phoenix Island dimly visible though the fog of an already-warm October morning. J.D. staggered as the boat appeared to hit an big wave, lurched, and dropped about a foot.
 "You might want to stand back a bit."
 "Thanks," he said. Without taking his eyes off the water, he retreated a few steps. "My name's J.D."
 "Hilary Chen," said the girl. She was an inch or two taller and had long, straight black hair. She sized him up with a calm, measured glance. "You're one of the two new kids."
 "I guess the uniform sort of gives us away," said J.D. They were both wearing white shirts and maroon blazers, she with a plaid skirt rather than his dark slacks.
 "There they are," she said. Out of the fog came the rising rip of a big diesel engine and the slap of a hull skipping across waves, and a long gray boat bounced into view, cutting right across their path. From the pilothouse just above them, J.D. could hear the ferry captain shout something unrepeatable, followed by a blast of the whistle.
 If the crew of the gray boat heard, they paid no attention, for it turned and began an orbit around the lumbering ferry. It was clearly Navy, J.D. thought, with a machine gun mounted forward and what looked like depth charges from some old World War II movie arrayed along the sides. And were those things torpedoes?
  A few of the sailors waved as the boat finished its loop, cutting so close that the bow sent a spray of water just where J.D. had been standing. He could see the captain, a tanned young man, shirtless, wearing dark sunglasses, throw a salute from his position at the wheel, then the boat broke off and skipped away, back into the fog.

Yeah, it's set in a one-room schoolhouse, on an island off a small town in Rhode Island, near the PT boat school in Melville in 1942.

Visit the NaNoWriMo web site to learn more.