Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month.

Friday marks the beginning of November and the kickoff of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a yearly challenge in which hundreds of thousands of writers aim to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days. Since the program started in 1999, organizers say, more than 250 writers have seen their novels published, including Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, Hugh Howey’s Wool, Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Jason Hough’s The Darwin Elevator, and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder.

But the real aim of the event is encouraging creativity and participation. Last year, according to the event's organizers, 341,375 people signed up on six continents, and even more are anticipated to start on Friday. More than 80,000 students and educators will participate in the "Young Writers Program" which is supported with free classroom materials. And it's not just a virtual experience: nearly 700 regional leaders will hold write-ins at libraries, coffee shops, and other locations around the world.

"NaNoWriMo is an unbeatable way to write the first draft of a novel because it's such a powerful antidote to that horrible foe of creativity: self doubt," Grant Faulkner, the project's executive director, said in a release. "NaNoWriMo is a rollicking conversation about all aspects of writing, and an invitation to dare to do what seems impossible. As many NaNoWriMo writers have discovered, the best way to learn to write a novel is by simply plunging in to write a novel."

Once again, I'll be taking part, and reporting my progress in that widget over in the right-hand sidebar (or underneath the post, if you're reading on a phone. Yay responsive design.)

While I haven't won since 2009 — honestly, haven't even come close — I'm feeling good about this year. Have a story I started over the summer at my yearly writing workshop at Toronto's Artscape Gibraltar Point which has extruded all sorts of limbs and pseudopods as I've continued to noodle with it in the notebook, and I'm thinking it will turn into a novella-kind-of-thing that might benefit from a 50K length.

The project is called "After the Gold Rush," and it's a time travel story set in New York City in September, 2001. Here's the open:

Photo courtesy NASA.

It would always be the sky she remembered from that morning, a preternatural blueness that stilled her to a breathless gape as she slipped out, morning coffee in hand, to the tiny patio overlooking Washington Street. The sun was up somewhere over the East River and Brooklyn, and the invisible roar of West Street traffic bounced off buildings, muted and out of phase. But it was the sky that held Bernadette captive: a late-summer azure that poured through the skyscrapers all the way down to ground level, soaking the waking world. She felt the pebbly paving bricks on her bare feet and sank into that depthless blue, savoring the caffeine buzz rising in her back brain.

Full disclosure: Written partially from a press release. And no, I didn't stick in the quote from Faulkner and the first graf of the story just to boost my word count. Although that is good practice...

The Saks Fifth Ave Bioshock/steampunk Xmas windows (see set on Flickr).

Sometimes, the bear eats you. It's December 1, and I barely scratched out 6K words on my NaNoWriMo novel. But this was not the ideal month, with the first week lost to the election, and the final weekend to a business trip to NY where I had the opportunity to see The Daily Show and "A Little Night Music" on Broadway.

I knew by last week that I wasn't going to make the deadline, so when we headed off to Pennsylvania to see the in-laws for Thanksgiving, I took along the short story I'm currently writing, and made a lot of progress in the final edit and polish, and I'll have that in the mail this month, so I consider that a moral victory.

On Sunday, on the way back to RI, they pushed me out of the car in Manhattan since I needed to be in town at 9am Monday for two days of business meetings.

So I wandered over to TKTS, and "A Little Night Music" was up. One of the advantages of only needing a single: the seat was first row orchestra. Bernadette Peters is absolutely amazing, and her "Send in the Clowns" is a heartbreaking theatrical experience, one of those moments — which occur most often in Sondheim shows — where the music becomes transparent, and you are not listening to a "show tune," but rather to a revealed moment of lived experience transmitted through song. Peters's delivery was devastatingly brilliant. And Elaine Stritch, as the borderline-senile grandmother, was at once commanding and frightfully vulnerable. Altogether, an amazing cast, and they're running through January, so if you have the opportunity, it's one Broadway ticket worth the price.

Monday was a full day meeting at mumble-mumble corporate headquarters, followed by the best team building event imaginable: VIP tickets to The Daily Show. One of our managers has a relative who works on the show, so we went in a side door, were tagged with little green VIP wristbands that said, "Not a threat to national security or The Daily Show," and got a tour.

It's like walking into a newsroom. The production has at least two floors of a building on the West side, and the feel is not like a TV production company, but more a media operation. Imagine walking into NBC news headquarters. There is a floor-length bullpen of cubicles full of writers and segment producers. An area where half-a-dozen interns were logging video. A couple of dogs wandering around. One room features a twenty-foot long, 8-foot high rack of DVRs, where just about everything on TV is being recorded and cataloged; around that room are desks where researchers sift through footage to find those devastating clips the show uses so expertly. An enormous master control room with a wall of monitors and banks of switchers. Makeup rooms. A couple of high-end edit suites.

We arrived during the rehearsal: the show is written in the morning, rehearsed at 4, then there are rewrites and tweaks, and the taping is at 6pm. The studio is larger than I would have expected, about 200 seats, with the majority facing the set, and a smaller VIP section off stage right. We were sitting with a bunch of Jon Stewart's high school friends, and when he came out to do his warmup, it became clear why special guests are out of direct line of sight: Stewart threw a glance at the guys behind us and called one of them by what was obviously their high school name, and broke out laughing. Just like he does in interviews. He's not acting when the guests say something that cracks him up. It's totally authentic.

As always with TV, the physical set is much smaller than you'd think. When Samantha Bee — sorry, Kim Sam Bee — came out to do her segment on North Korea, she was literally five feet from Stewart's desk. There are just two floor cameras and one on a boom, and just about enough space for them to move around.

But what was most notable was how tight the show was. For something written in a day, it was shot in about 45 minutes — during the commercial breaks, the floor manager and a script guy would go up and caucus with Stewart, but only for a couple of minutes. No retakes, no touch ups. When I watched the show Monday night, what I saw was what they'd shot in the afternoon. Clearly, a well-oiled machine by this point, but when you consider the enormous amount of research and pre-production that has to happen every day, it's still pretty amazing.

Full disclosure: Yes, it should be pretty obvious why I haven't posted anything in a week. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving break.

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.

With a day to spare, and just 50 words of headroom, I crossed the finish line of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) at 12:05 this morning, certifying my scrambled manuscript for the alternate history novel "Fist of the Ape," written in the past thirty days. I won't pretend it was easy, nor that it would have been possible without the support of my family, friends, and the awesome Wrimos in Rhode Island and beyond.

I will confess that there was a very bad point this afternoon when I realized that I had counted about a thousand words twice. It very nearly kicked my ass, when I thought I was at 48K and was really only at 47. But with some encouragement, I cranked six thousand words to put this thing to bed.

Thanks to Karen, for putting up with a month of craziness (and for being polite, when reading the manuscript, and saying only "I can tell where you had the flu..."), and Jack, who didn't have as much homework time with daddy. I will make it up to you. Thanks to the gang at the Gibraltar Point science fiction workshop (you know who you are) where I plotted the outline for this book three years ago. And a special shout-out to hazwastegirl, who made writing sprints at the Warren Coffee Depot such crazy fun.

And now, because I have to share, the only marginally publishable copy. (Which is to say, uh, I actually edited this...)

Synopsis: Fist of the Ape

In an alternate WWII, a US weapons expert and his code-talking sidekick pair up with a Russian spy to track down a possible Nazi atomic bomb.

Excerpt: Fist of the Ape

Manhattan, July 28, 1945, 9:40am
People on the streets recalled hearing the airplane first; a big Army bomber from the sound of it, coming in from the East River. They might have looked up, but couldn't even see the tops of buildings in the drifting cloud deck. The plane was clearly over the city, they remembered, and far too low.

In the Empire State Building, the Saturday shift of the Catholic War Relief Board was beginning their work day. Perhaps they caught a rumble of approaching engines; there might have been time for a glance out the window.

Then the bomber emerged from the fog and struck head-on.

Twenty tons of airplane plowed through the limestone facade and exploded into the building; the B-25 came apart in a fireball, sending a hailstorm of wreckage tearing through offices. The workers, a typical wartime mix of old men, teenagers, and nuns, were killed at their desks, crushed or incinerated.

The left engine penetrated the elevator core, sheared cables, and plummeted to the basement.

One heavy chunk of wreckage passed entirely through the 79th floor, blowing an exit wound in the south wall and plunging across 33rd street to bury itself in the top floor of a warehouse.

When the Office of Strategic Service agents arrived, they had no time to listen to witnesses babbling excitedly to the cops, and they had only the briefest glance for the smoking hole in the side of the skyscraper. None of that was important. The debris across the street was all that that was of interest to them.

Click to visit NaNoWriMo

At 12:01am on November first, hundreds of thousands of fingers will start pounding keyboards in a frenzied effort to crank out a novel in just 30 days.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a gonzo word spree whose goal is to coax a 50K-word-novel out of every participant. Now in its 11th year, NaNoWriMo has been steadily growing from its origin as a 21-member "noveling binge" in the San Francisco Bay area. Last year, according to organizers, there were almost 120,000 entries, with over 20,000 "winners."

And how do you win? One simple, unassailable metric: You write 50K words. No literary standards. No judging. Nobody even reads the entries; they're just word-counted by a web site. It's the process, organizers say, that makes this kind of thing worthwhile.

"The 50,000-word challenge has a wonderful way of opening up your imagination and unleashing creative potential like nothing else," NaNoWriMo Founder and Program Director (and ten-time NaNoWriMo winner) Chris Baty said in a statement. "When you write for quantity instead of quality, you end up getting both. Also, it's a great excuse for not doing any dishes for a month."

Local groups of participants have "write-ins" to help keep everyone motivated, and there is a great web site, complete with a "Procrastination Station" (go for the exercises, stay for the dolphin cheese). Online discussion boards and e-mails help keep everyone in touch and maintain a sense of community.

But it's not all just for fun and camaraderie, say the organizers. More than 30 NaNoWriMo novelists have had their "NaNo-novels" published, including Sarah Gruen, whose New York Times #1 Best Seller, Water for Elephants began as a NaNoWriMo novel.

I've never done NaNoWriMo before, so this is going to be an interesting experience. Pushing 50,000 words out in a month seems pretty daunting. I wrote 5 short stories during the six weeks of the Clarion workshop, but that was probably about 30K in total. And I will admit that I was pretty fried by the time that was over.

Bottom line: You can expect me to yak about this a fair bit during November. And if my coverage of local meetings is just a bit thinner, I hope you'll understand.

ps: I do have an outline for the novel, a hard-sf secret history of the end of WWII.