It’s just after 7pm on Saturday 1 November and I’ve finished my first day’s writing in the NaNoWriMo challenge. I managed 2,108 words today, which I’m really pleased with. It took me about 3 hours, a little over 1 hour in the morning straight writing (about 1,000 words) and in the evening I spent 1-2 hours writing interspersed with some research on the Web. I’ll post my daily update in my menu, under “Internal Links”, using Erik Benson’s Excel spreadsheet. Hopefully I can keep up this pace.
What is my novel about? I’m still working on the plot, but I can say that a couple of the main themes will be Two-Way Communication and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The main character’s name is Declan Atomz and he’s a 30-year old Technical Support for a dot com software company. He’s an amateur astronomer and a lifelong “tinkerer” with electronic equipment. In my current plans, I have him undergoing a big transformation later in the novel – which has a little something to do with the SETI theme 😉
btw, one reason why I’m writing this novel is to explore themes – such as two-way communication – that seem to demand a bigger canvas than a weblog. I got the feeling during the “broadcasting vs conversations” dialogue last week that I needed a more creative way of expressing my ideas, as some people didn’t grok what I was trying to say. Perhaps this was due to the way I said it. So I’m hoping the process of writing a novel in a month will not only enable me to fully explore these themes that want a wide canvas, but at the end of the process I’ll hopefully be a better weblog writer for it.
