Well, actually, I just found about it this week. The NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is “contest” to encourage people to write a novel. The goal is to write 50k words in one month.. from scratch, starting at 00:01 on Nov 1st with the deadline being 23:59 on Nov 30th.
So I’m going to do it. I’ve been wanting to get back into writing speculative fiction for a few years now but work, wife, kid, Xbox, etc. have all gotten in the way. =) Very few people know this about me, but back when I was in highschool I started a fantasy trilogy and wrote 2.5 books in it. I never did finish it. I picked up reading it a few months ago and now I think those rejection letters of the happily-optimistic-16-year-old were well justified. =) It’s not that the writing was awful but dang it… I had enough ideas crammed in there for 20 books and the writing style wasn’t the greatest (at least not to begin with but, then again, I started it when I was in grade 9 (so, what, 14 years old?). The stuff near the end when I was 18 was much much better.
At any rate, I have no idea what I’m going to write about other than that it will be fantasy-ish (but I don’t like using the term fantasy because that gives ideas of Tolkien and unicorns and furry hobbits, etc. — what I have rattling around in my skulll is more like mythology than fantasy). Should be interesting. No idea what, if anything, will happen with it come the end of November but maybe it’ll get these creative juices flowing again. If nothing else, it’ll be fun to try and write something that isn’t “technical” in nature. =)