Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I have a vague idea for a novel — but I’m fried tonight. I was at my first LEAMIS board meeting and retreat last night and during the day today in Monteagle. (I spent the night in Tracy City.) The meeting was productive but very challenging, even emotional at times, and then I had to drive back here from Monteagle.

I may start the novel tomorrow. On both of the occasions when I completed NaNoWriMo, I had missed a day somewhere along the way and had to make it up. It seems like a bad idea to miss the first day, of course. Maybe I’ll at least set up the .doc file and try to pump out a page or two some time before bed tonight, just so I’ll have some motivation to continue tomorrow.

Then again, I may just spend the month trying to sell last year’s NaNoWriMo novel.

Meanwhile, I am thrilled to say that Newscoma is participating, and not only participating — she’s blogging her novel as she goes. I tried that for a little while during my first (and first successful) NaNoWriMo in 2004, and it was a lot of fun, but then I ended up going back and making some minor plot tweaks to what I’d already written (usually a bad idea for NaNoWriMo), and I didn’t want to bother with trying to make the blog match the manuscript, so I just took the blog down.

I love what ‘coma has done so far, and I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed. Writing under pressure releases kinds of creativity that wouldn’t come out otherwise. Of course, those of us who know Trace will not be surprised by the novel’s general theme. I think it’s cute that — in the process of asking me for some information about the NaNoWriMo site — she apologized for the foul language, because, you know, I’m religious, which means I’ve never in my life read or heard foul language before. It might give me the vapors or something.