I'm writing a novel

Hi everyone,

I've decided to write a novel. Yes, I know, that puts me at the very back of the line of fellow Hunter College graduates who have valiantly decided to grace the world with their novels. Or Psychology dissertations. If you're really honest with yourself, the world needs one about as much as it needs the other. But that doesn't so much matter. Everyone's got to have a passion, right? Otherwise how in the world do you justify say, philosophy, or astronomy, or say, internet marketing? If those three fields collapsed, we'd have a shortage of exactly three things:

1)Pissed-off upper middle class parents who can't make themselves believe that $40,000 dollars per semester is going towards a degree in "advanced critical thinking"

2)Men in mostly superfluous labcoats naming planets things like Quaoar. They would be immediately replaced with a motley variety of star-naming websites.

3)Twitter.

No one would care.

However, just like it's important to have passions, it's extremely important to do what you're really good at. That is, not what you're supposed to be good at, or that thing you can do sort of begrudgingly for a maximum of eight hours at a time, provided you can spend most of those hours fantasizing about the cute girl you saw that morning and no less than an hour for lunch (your job). No, what I'm talking about is that thing you naturally react to without having to think to much about it. It's that thing you can relax into without thinking too much.

When I watch pro wrestling for example, I know when a spot is going longer than it's supposed to, or why a wrestler missed a move he normally would've hit. This is based on prior experience watching pro wrestling, and is, as you may have guessed, wholly and completely useless to my everyday experience. Look, it's not that I wouldn't want to become a pro wrestler. It's just that my throat would hurt after a while:



But writing is also one of my things. I usually get so bleedin nervous when it's time to do it that I write in short, clipped, bursts in messy handwriting, so to make sure I don't actually have to face what I've done. I'm not sure why I'm like that. Why don't you write a dissertation about it?

Then, as I read Neil Gaiman's blog everyday, I was reminded about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea of the contest is such: one starts writing on November 1st, and attempts to write 50,000 words by November 30th. Whoever has done so uploads their books to the website and feels extremely satisfied with themselves. The goal of the whole thing is to just write, because, as the website says, most people, left to their own devices, would never actually write the novel.

The contest also suggests that an author tell all his friends about it, since the embarrassment at having to admit his failure will, when all else fails, keep the embattled author from quitting.

So, this, after all, is the point of this whole thing. I'm telling you all so that some of you will tell me,

So where is that novel I heard so much about? You know, the one I had to read a whole pointless blog post about before you got down to the point? You didn't quit did you?

Well, did I?

If I did, it's all your bloody fault. And probably a little bit her fault:



She takes up a lot of my time.

Boris