29 October 2008

NaNoWriMo

Posted by Ryan Anderson

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein

Starting on Saturday, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an annual activity in which insane writers attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The rules are that you can plan as much (or as little) as you want beforehand, but the page must remain blank until 12:00 AM on November 1st. I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but I have the bad habit of editing as I write, which causes me to lose momentum pretty quickly. The point of NaNoWriMo is to get over that urge to edit meticulously and just get stuff written without turning back. Editing is for December!

In any case, I bring this up because I am a mere mortal, so time spent writing a novel means time that I won’t be able to spend here. I will continue to update the blog, but posts may be less frequent as I try to balance research, novel writing, blogging, and “real life”. I am sure you are greatly dismayed to hear that posting may be less frequent here, but there is something that you can do to help: Suggest blog topics!

If you suggest topics, then I don’t have to come up with them and can just focus on writing about them when I have the chance. So if there’s something that you’d like to know about Mars or space exploration (or anything else, really…) just post a comment or send me an email!

Also, fear not, because less writing time will likely mean more pretty pictures! A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. (hmm… can I use that to reach my 50k words for the novel?)