It's getting more real.

Saturday was the Chicago-area kickoff party for National Novel Writing Month. It was bizarre for me — mainly because this introvert actually attended an event where I knew not a single soul. It turned out to be a pretty cool event, if only to get the opportunity to check out the Uptown Writers Space, which I've wanted to do for some time.

I quickly gravitated toward other NaNoWriMo virgins like myself . . . or perhaps most of the people there were newbies, I'm not sure. We immediately talked about how we discovered NaNoWriMo, how difficult we thought it was going to be, how much prep (if any) we had done. I was pretty shocked to discover that, of the five people in our little chat circle, I was by far the most "prepared." Three of the others had no clue what they would be writing come midnight 11/1. One had a vague idea — basically a title — and a setting. And that was it.

I put "prepared" in quotes above because I'm not sure that it's wise to be too prepared for NaNoWriMo. By actually having some character studies and a vague plot outline, I wonder if I'm already narrowing my options, painting myself into a corner, and preparing to go blank when things don't seem to be going the way I expected. There should be no surprise that this is a metaphor for issues in my life (especially my creative life), where I have always struggled with the idea of improvising when things go pear-shaped from how I had planned it. Maybe this will be my great battle in November.

I wouldn't have been as prepared as I am if it weren't for the hour-and-a-half I spent on the El on Friday night when I headed downtown for a going-away party for a friend. (For those of you keeping score, that was two social events in a 24-hour period — a level of social involvement I don't believe I've achieved since college.) On the ride to and from downtown, with the accompaniment of 39 songs shuffling on my iPod, I got down sketches of my main character, his father, his love interest, her daughter, the daughter's best friend/unofficial guardian. I also got down on paper for the first time some of the many "moments" and scenes that have been flying inside my head.

Then, Sunday morning, when Zuzu got up insanely early, I settled her in front of Go, Diego, Go and I started outlining my plot. Half an hour later, I was petrified: while I have a beginning, middle, and end, ther are enormous gaps in between. You know, where the real stuff happens.

But Chris Baty assures me (via his book) that I don't need to worry about this. I need to let that fear go, trust that the magic will happen in the middle of the night. And I'm going to trust Baty — though I have to admit that this is sounding suspiciously like the "think method" espoused in Meredith Willson's The Music Man.

So, I'm gonna write a novel.

Shortly after graduating from college, I found myself living in a rented bedroom in Hoboken, New Jersey. It would be an understatement to refer to this room as drafty. All winter long, there was a strong, dry westerly breeze blowing across the edge of my forehead I allowed to peek out from underneath too few bedcovers. No frost gathered on my windowsills only because of the complete lack of humidity. That plastic you put over windows in winter was literally blown off the window in the course of one evening. It was a barren, terrible existence, but I was 22 and willing to put up with just about anything to, you know, do "the New York thing."

Out of desperation for some hope to cling to, I started writing a novel one night. It was supposed to be some sort of nouveau-romantic thing. A clarinetist in a small but relatively famous chamber ensemble in NYC. The guest conductress who comes to work with them for a yearlong residency. Clarinetist and the conductress fall for each other, and then ...

And then ...

And that's really as far as I got. That was 45 or so pages on 8-1/2 x 11, double-spaced. On a typewriter. (My roommate had a Mac (ca. 1987), but he made it clear that it was his Mac, so I was relegated to the electric Royal that had served me so ably in college.) The thing ran out of steam because I had absolutely NO idea where it was going.

By the way, it was titled The Long, Sudden-Ended Always. I leave it to you to track down the reference, just so you can fully bask in my early-20s pretentiousness.

Last February, an idea popped into my head — the first time I had an idea that I immediately knew could, or maybe had to be, a novel. I wonder who could write it, I thought. Which is a tragic testament to how far I've grown out of touch with my muse. If you're not careful, parenting can do that to ya.

Two months later, I was hanging out in a stationery store when I noticed a copy of Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem! Reading the back, I discovered that Baty was the founder of National Novel Writing Month, and that there was (of course) a web site for NaNoWriMo. Which, a couple of weeks later, I visited.

I don't know exactly when "concept for novel" met "opportunity," but it took longer than it should have. (Cf. sleeping muse) But you can't get the easy stuff past me forever: I finally figured out that I was supposed to write this novel, and that November was when I'd be doing it.

The reason I'm telling you this now is one of Baty's ideas for making sure your novel will get written. In No Plot? No Problem! he writes: "Terror is the amateur novelist's best friend. Without some amount of it pushing you onward toward your goal, you're going to lose momentum and quit." So, he recommends, tell as many people as you possibly can. Not just telling — boasting.

Think about it: do you really want to be the butt of jokes every time novels are mentioned? For the rest of your life?. . . I don't either. Which is why I make a point of laying a solid foundation of bragging way before I've thought about plot or setting or character. My ultimate goal is to back yourself into a corner before the month even starts that I have no choice but to stay on course with the word count, no matter how dismally off-track my novel gets in the weeks that follow.

The goal with this project is to turn off your "inner editor." Just forge ahead. Get it down. It's much easier to mold something out of text that exists than to face that blank screen. So, starting at 12 a.m. on November 1st, I am headed toward 50,000 words, to be completed no later than 11:59 p.m. on November 30th. On the surface, this should be a slam-dunk for me: I type at a ridiculous speed and I have a fairly quick mind. Of course, in practice this will undoubtedly be a whole lot harder.

(Especially as I've already started to let the minutiae of my plot setting begin to overwhelm me. But I'll save that discussion 'til later.)

What the hell. I'm not marathoning anymore, so why not give this a shot? I can cut back on the TV watching (it's rotting my brain anyway). I've got a couple of hours every night between, oh, 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. or so. I've got a lot of ambient music. And Laura is cool with my escaping to cafés and libraries to vary my writing settings. It's only a month, right?

*sigh*

I'm setting myself up for disaster here, aren't I?

I hope to use this blog for notes on the experience along the way (though I'm not honestly sure how much more additional time I'll have to write). And if you look in the right gutter of this page, you'll see a meter to keep track of my progress toward word #50,000.

Cheers are acceptable. So is rubbing my nose in it if I don't succeed.