National Novel Writing Month

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, for short), or to most people on this planet, the month of November. This amazing event is absolutely free to participate in, and offers a tremendous potential reward upon completion (that would be personal satisfaction). The only stipulation is that no writing begins before the first of November, and the novel must be at a minimum length of 50,000 words.

As long as I have known about this event - approximately three years - I have longed to participate. Two years ago I created a blog for the express purpose of writing a novel in a month. It contains zero posts. Last year, I actually started writing something, but it was so tremendously autobiographical and laughably bad I gave up after two or three pages (I think that was about 1,000 words or less, to give some perspective).

This year I feel as though I actually have to give it a satisfactory effort. These past few months in school have probably been the worst of my life. The levels of apathy and general unhappiness I've reached are nearing critical mass. I need to at least try to do what I would like to do, so that I can say I tried.

I have an idea for a story that I think is decent, and I've spent the last few days thinking about scenarios and metaphors while my professors have looked quizzically at the empty shell slouching in a desk chair in front of them. Do they really expect me to care about pipelining or networking (of the human variety), when these things are completely devoid of any greater meaning?

I think they do, but I can't be bothered; for it is the eve of National Novel Writing Month, and I've got my own marlin to catch before the sharks leave only the dregs!