Ready or not, November is here. NaNoWriMo is here.

It’s time to write a novel in 30 days. Piece of cake. Of course, I still have that job thing, and the husband and kids, and some kind of social life, although I’ve done a good job of suffocating that beyond recognition these last months. But that’s good, because the heroine of my story lives in isolation, and this is good preparation.

At any rate, I have a better plot now thanks to a sick day yesterday (which, alas, I took because I was sick). It’s been a few years since I delved into novel writing, so we’ll see if my fear of commitment becomes a player in all this mess. But I tend to face my fears, once I’m aware of them,  with a machete in hand (hello second marriage!), so yeah, there’s that.

Anyway, it won’t be a finished novel. This is a way of getting people to get over themselves in some ways and just commit words to paper, or screen, or whatever. I’m usually a slow and deliberate writer (not in blogging though, ha, can you tell?), so this is an interesting challenge, and I think it’ll be worth trying.

Am I ready? Um, I think this is like parenting. You’re never ready and if you think you are, you will spend the rest of your life with that stunned look on your face you’ve so often made fun of in others. Actually, that’ll pretty much happen either way.

So no, I’m not ready, but I’m going to start anyway.

Want inspiration?
Even if you say no, watch this video. It’s not very long and it won’t hurt much.

This is a video of my old friend Gabe at a poetry slam, shortly before she died at far too young an age. We’d both had some very similar and rough times our first year of college, and she never gave up, which is more than I can say for myself. We weren’t that  close, but I always admired her. I’d only reconnected with her a year or less before she got the diagnosis, and that was very brief. Anyway, she’d been working with poetry slams for a long time, but didn’t usually get up and speak herself.

She knew she was dying. She has a message for the rest of us.

Time is short. See you in a while. I’ll be under this rock, trying to write.