Doing Write

Okay, so I have no copious free time. Work, family life ... gaming, blogging ... housecleaning, gardening ... church stuff ... I'm putting in 27 hour days it sometimes feels like.

So one thing I am not doing this year, alas, is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. I mean, aside from valuing my marriage enough not to drive Margie into a homicidal frenzy by my writing 1700 words a day, every day of the month of November, I acknowledge I simply can't do it. Not without giving up something use of value, like CoH, or my job, or sleep. (And there's not much left of the last of those, believe you me.)

However ...

One thing I am doing is a NaNoWriMo-inspired joint writing project, organized by Doyce, run on a wiki along the lines of Neel Krishnaswami's Lexicon RPG. Every five days, each of us has to write a short story (925 words) in a common (but broad) setting. These stories, in the beginning of the month, make references to future stories to be written (by others in the group), while as we get to the end of the month, the references tend to be back to prevous stories. Those references can be places, objects, people, events, all centered around a rather remarkable inn ...

There's nine of us doing this, so over the course of the month, we'll jointly come up with something that's NaNoWriMo-length (50,000 words).

You'll notice I'm not linking to the effort yet, largely due to the group consensus that we'd rather kick this out in private first, then open it up to the world. I'm pretty happy by what I've done so far, particularly the story I did today (cough) (four days early and nearly three time the minimum length required) (cough), and working with a shared and forceably interlocked world like this is both frustrating and giddying.

Of course, I have no spare time to do this. But ... well, when the Muse knocks, I've learned it's little use to bar the door.