No, it’s not some kind of mis-spelled Mork and Mindy reference. No, it’s that I’m taking part in NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo. As Steve points out (a fellow NaBloPoMo participant), these sound like sections of Judoon dialogue.

However, they are in fact writing challenges. I’ll start with the simplest.

This is NaBloPoMo, which I am taking part in this month. This is National Blog Posting Month (the November 2008 flavour — I believe it runs every month), and the idea is to produce one blog post every day. As challenges go, this ought to be relatively straightforward — I produced 32 blog posts in October, and more than 30 again in September, so I am confident I can achieve this target.

NaNoWriMo, on the other hand, may be somewhat more complicated. The idea is to write a novel in November. Well, I’m not entirely sure: I read somewhere that you’re supposed to write 50,000 words, but I’m not sure whether that means you have succeeded if you have written this many words but your novel is not quite finished, or what. I’m working on the assumption that if I can somehow turn out 50,000 words of fiction in November — 1667 words per day — that I will jolly well feel I’ve earned the NaNoWriMo award, even if I am a chapter or two short of the end…

They even have a pretty little widgety thingummy which shows how many words you’ve written so far, colouring days in red or green depending on whether you’ve achieved your target (1667), failed your target, or done one or the other in spectacular fashion. As the site itself currently seems to be working grindingly slow (maybe there are more participants than their servers can comfortably cope with?) there is every possibility that I won’t be updating their site every single day with my current word count.

Don’t be too surprised if I therefore have a fair number of red days. As long as I’m averaging 1667 words per day, that’ll do for me.

With NaNoWriMo, you’re not supposed to do any editing until you’ve finished, which presumably means by the end the narrative might make no sense as a whole until you’ve had the chance to go back and edit it, but I think this is because if you’ve got to write 50,000 words in a month, you’ve not got time to go back and polish every last sentence, you just have to keep churning out the words.

Any references to “not being able to polish a turd” anyway would not be appreciated at this point, ‘kay?

At the point of starting NaNoWriMo (November 1st), I felt it might be useful to have a plot in mind; a rough sketch of the protagonists, what is going to happen, and some notes on the setting. But I also felt that would be kind of cheating, so I’ve started entirely cold. Let’s see how this pans out, eh?