National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a NanoWrimo starts today. It’s an exercise in writing a lot, and not editing. Put those fingers to the keyboards and type, type, type.
I’ve written about NanoWrimo before. It’s not for everyone, but it has utility by getting people to put their butts in the chair and write—writing being the most important task for any writer. I’ve never attempted it because I know I’m doomed to failure with respect to the daily word count. I know this about myself and am perfectly happy.
How NanoWrimo is useful to me, and possibly to you, is to highlight the need to sit down and write something. Anything. The repeated task, no matter how lengthy it is, will build the habit of putting words onto the page, blog or whatever.
To that end, I’m going to attempt thirty essays in thirty days throughout the month of November. Some of them may be similar to things you see on Talking Traffic. Others may be word-vomit that has no basis in reality or deep thought. Who knows! Well, I do. The second category will be dependent on how much research is required on a topic. I have a draft list of topics and some of them honestly are not suitable to a daily hour long effort, requiring time and research and editing, but I don’t care! That’s the whole point of NanoWrimo.
Write, write, WRITE, until you’re done writing. Usually this writing isn’t supposed to be insta-published because it’s likely to have flaws, however I will be, so you can expect less word count and more editing. To make the 50k words that NanoWrimo exemplifies you have to write 1,667 words per day. As of this word right here, I’m at 295. Not going to get even close to the NanoWrimo count, but that’s ok because who wants to read a daily 1,667 word essay? Especially if it’s word-vomit like this is turning out to be.
Topics you can expect to read about (but your mileage may vary): running, traffic engineering, autonomous cars, the evilness of cats, Griffin (the child, not the mythical creature), space, parenting, how Elsa is the worst but potentially the world’s savior, Puerto Rico, etc.
Watch this space. Stuff will appear. I’ll take advantage of this to put up pictures again. It’s been a while.
Leave a Reply