Countdown to Year Four

I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers,
are about as good one day as the next, hangovers apart.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

So, dear readers, all three of you... Yours Truly is foolish enough to try NaNoWriMo yet again, and this blog will serve yet again as a collection bin for asides, random thoughts, off topic rants and general musings about the fine art of creative writing.

Read back a couple of posts to the Year Three Introduction. It stands, as is, for this year, too.

YT has given a lot of thought to the Year Two novel, or rather how it could be turned into a real novel with such niceties as three-dimensional characters, believable dialog and properly paced plot. It makes sense but still needs a better Act Three. The gizmo novel from Year Three is banished to the bottomest of bottom drawers, more like a lead-lined crypt. YT guesses it is possible to write fiction too close to real life, something he found he has no stomach for, all things considered. But that's the past and sometime future.

This year's idea was going to be a satire about who decided when the turn of the century should be held. But a chance remark on an e-mail list gave YT an even better idea. Flash back to the heady days of the dot-com boom. Some companies made their founders outrageously rich on the promise of a revolutionary product, the merest whisper of sweet buzzwords in the ears of big money that wanted to be glamorous no matter what. So what if the entrepreneurs weren't the only ones looking to ride the boom for their own purposes? Voila, YT gives his kind readers Grand Theft Cambridge.

Oh, yeah, about plot... Years One, Two and especially Three ran out of steam eventually because of lack of thinking through a plot. It's fine for the characters to have adventures, but eventually they have to stop milling around and actually go somewhere. The stream of consciousness that is NaNo needs to run in a deeper channel. So this year October is YT's private NaNoPlotMo: one plot point per day, thirty plus an epilogue idea by the end of the month.

Yeah, yeah, it's not supposed to mean anything besides letting loose the Inner Temperamental Artist, but you know what? YT is just a tad bit enamoured of the notion he can write better than some published author, somewhere. Okay, better than Kristen Haring -- that's an easy hurdle to jump. Heh. So November will either confirm this crazy notion or deliver a message from Mundane Reality. Either way, Thursday, November 1, can't come too soon!