FanPost

National Novel Writing Month and What’s Your Blog?

It is a well established fact that there are a host of great writers here on Canis Hoopus and while I will not be so bold as to suggest that I am myself a great writer I am willing to include myself amongst those who are interested in writing as a form of communication, as an art form, and as a process. I know that I am not alone here in this particular interest.


The pinnacle of my personal writing came in the years directly after graduating from college when I became obsessed with the short story form. You know, Chekhov, Carver, O’Connor. I took classes at the Loft, read poetry at an Irish bar, learned to drink whiskey, and wrote short stories in my spare time. The concept of spare time was key to this. As I’m sure is the case for many of you, my life was very different in my mid twenties. Gradually the writing just kind of slipped away. I always assumed (hoped) that I would get back to it but for some reason just never seemed to. In particular I imagined that I would someday write a novel- a dream that seemed to get further and further away as the years without writing piled up.


A few years ago my wife, who is always up to some kind of art project, told me she was doing this thing called national novel writing month where you challenge yourself to write 50,000 words over the course of November. This works out to be about 1600 words per day, everyday, for 30 days. Crazy right? Well, last year I went for it. I’d had an idea floating around in my mind for a few years and I just jumped in. I worked up an outline and each day I wrote and wrote. If I skipped a day I wrote more the next day and at the end of November I had just over 50,000 words. I continued to work on this for several months and somewhere towards the end of last winter my admittedly short novel was done at just about 65,000 words. I spent the rest of the year revising and rewriting. I turns out I make a lot of mistake and can’t spell for shit.


Now I realize that I am not the next F. Scott Fitzgerald and what I came up with is not the next great american novel. I’ve no doubt that despite my many times through this it continues to be riddled with typos, misspellings, punctuation errors and the like. Still it was a fun process and, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I have to say that I have gained even more respect for what it takes to make a novel. Overall the experience has been quite a bit of fun and I am proud of the accomplishment. It was definitely something I always wanted to do and now I have done it. If you want to read it, or glance at it, or mock it, or whatever, you can find it posted on my blog that I rarely update and that hardly anyone even knows about.


Here is the link.


I am also curious to know who else here at Canis Hoopus has a blog? Post a link to share your thoughts on all things basketball or otherwise or to just increase the traffic to your site. I know that there are a good many smart people here, many of whom take writing very seriously, and I for one would like to see where else you can be found on this world wide web thing.