No Novel November

Holy Guacamole! What happened to November? It's already the 30th, and I've missed all but the last few hours of National Novel Writing Month. I have just hours to either write a 50,000 word novel -- at this point that's approximately 25,000 words an hour -- or face being a miserable failure once again.

NaNoWriMo has very few rules, you can check it out at nanowrimo.org, or just take my word for it. Write fast, write furious and write often, with the goal of producing a 175-page novel. Quantity, not quality. No plot? No problem. What's not to love? That Nov. 30 deadline, that's what. One little rule that has been my downfall the last three years.

But no more.

Rules? I don't need no steenking rules! I'm the Queen. I issue the rules around here. And so, by Royal Decree, I am ordering a re-do on November. Well, maybe not a re-do, exactly. I'm not sure November was good enough to repeat. It wasn't bad, but hey -- been there, done that, crossed the days off the calendar already.

It's not like I have anything against December, either. It's been waiting patiently -- through 11 long months -- for its turn. Repeating November would be like cutting in line. And I hate line jumpers.

Instead of a repeat or a delay, let's just call it "Nocember" and split the difference. If stores can market Christmas in July, and all but trample over the turkeys in their rush to welcome Santa, I can create Nocember.

Handy, don't you think, that Nocember starts the same day as the Gregorian calendar's December? Yep, that's my OCD showing. I have enough trouble remembering the dates of appointments and events without trying to figure out some sort of exchange rate between calendars. Once I get a little more comfortable in this new role of Queen of Everything, Including Space and Time, I might adjust the numbering or naming of days. A Monday by any other name would still smell just as rank, but troubled spellers the world over would thank me for changing Wed-nes-day.

Quite frankly, I'm tired of this 24-hour, 7-day a week schedule. The rest of the world can conform to my schedule for a while. Some days you just need an extra hour or two to get things done. And sometimes things need to move along a little faster. Ooops, sorry, Thursday has been canceled this week, we'll have to schedule that meeting for another day.

After all, isn't our entire concept of time just an artificial construct? Hours, days and weeks are just units of measure created to give structure to man's existence. They create the impression of order while ultimately limiting our experience to the here and now.

By the way, I spent my Augtober getting my PhD in BS.

But this is not a time to look backward, nor a time to wax philosophical. Now is the time to make plans for Nocember, and more specifically my own personal NaNoWriMo. So I suppose you could call it JoNoWriMo. Hmmm, that sounds a little too much like the way my November actually turned out -- Jo no write month.

NoProBlameOh.

Since my goal isn't to create a novel there's no "No" no mo'. Instead I shall challenge myself to blog everyday of the month, making it JoBloWriMo. That sounds vaguely... weird, but it will have to do.

Now for that word count. To reach 50,000 in 30 days I would have to write about 1,667 words every day. Considering this is number 537, this project may run into Nocemburary.

What the heck. I've got all the time in the world.