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Gonna Write that Novel on The Snowy Day


As I mentioned yesterday, it’s NaNoWriMo time and I was musing about getting back to writing that actual first novel for once. So today, I started it. I have decided to fictionalize the life I didn’t have. The one where my natural mom kept me instead of giving me away to be adopted. I am going to say that so far, I am not envisioning an existence that is much of an improvement over the one I ended up with but it’s only chapter two.

I started using a planner again to map out my days and weeks, which is proving valuable in terms of cleaning, decluttering, and writing. Hopefully it will help me finish this novel. End goal? A short novel by the end of the month. And then we will see where to go after that.

In other news, it’s snowing like a bastard. I don’t know that I have ever despised winter as much as I do now. Snow has its sports but most of them are funding intensive. Winter is mainly a chore and a hazard for people who are forced by necessity to leave their homes and navigate the world. Municipalities have become worse and worse at making winter semi-endurable. Roads are shite. Sidewalks are worse. The inability to safely get about does nothing to make this season more appealing. I don’t care how pretty it looks.

When I was a kid, I loved snow. I spent hours outside. Sledding. Building forts. Skating. I was the last child in nearly every night. Pant legs frozen stiff and face chapped with wind burn. There was something peaceful about the dark with just starlight and a frozen moon looking down on you. But when you’ve adulted in winter as long as I have, the lustre wanes.

I was hoping the endlessness of day after day snowfall would hold off another month but that doesn’t appear to be our fate this year. And I still don’t have the snow tires on the truck. Wish me luck.

NaNoWriMo 2022


I’ll bet it’s been a decade since I gave NaNoWriMo a go. I completed the task of writing a 50k novel in a month at least once, but once the blogging community died, so did the camaraderie of the event. Yes, they have a website and forums too, I think, but it was far more fun engaging with the bloggers and writers in my own circles, and those circles are long gone.

To achieve the end goal, I will need to write about 1500 plus words a day. It’s not really as hard as it sounds. 1500 words is five pages ish. The hard part is five pages and then five more pages that are coherent and connected. Those pages have to be going somewhere. Blogging is much easier because every post is self-contained. I am not trying to tell a story from one day to the next. So I am not at all sure I am up to this task at the moment.

Of course, on the other hand (because there is always another hand), does it matter? Does it have to be any good? It could just be an exercise in getting back to fiction writing. Priming that pump, so to speak.

It’s a bit late in the day to churn out six pages. If I do this, I will start tomorrow. And it’s not like I don’t have ideas. We are living in end times of a sort and perhaps instead of torturing my family and friends with my doom scenarios, I should just write one down. Or I could explore the life I think I might have had with my natural parents if society hadn’t shamed my mother into giving me up for adoption.

The bones of novels exist in my brain. Hell, they literally exist in a dozen scribblers squirrelled away in various drawers in my house. I have been writing stories since I could think. It’s really not that onerous a step to type them out.

The Coming Twitterpocalypse


I am not going to pretend to know what is going to happen to Twitter now that Elon Musk owns it. Social media sites are the ultimate nft really. They aren’t tangible but for the content supplied for free by the users of the sites. The owners are doing what owners do, borrowing cash using other people’s content as collateral. Allowing them to do this is the price of admission and always has been regardless of the space. They don’t, however, last forever. Having been in virtual spaces on the Internet for the last two plus decades has taught me this much.

I have never been a super big fan of Twitter as an experience. I originally signed up only because it was a condition of the work I was doing for the various sites I worked as a blogger. But, along the way, I made the occasional impact and acquired acquaintances and even friends as I accidentally seem to do. It’s not time I considered wasted at all.

For now, it remains a public square of some consequence. Twitter is the place journalists go to find news. That’s what drew the disinformationists. In my opinion, it’s too soon for progressives to abandon it to the incels and nazi-types. We can still amplify facts and make a difference until we can’t anymore, so we should.