Prepoceros

After a week and a half of half-heartedly trying to dream up a main character or some semblance of a plot, I’ve decided that novels just aren’t my style. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on NaNoWriMo entirely; I’m only changing the format slightly. Instead of pounding out a 50,000-word work of fiction, I’ll focus my thirty frenzied days on a more practical form: the essay.

If you’re anything like most of the high-schoolers I teach (not that you are, necessarily), you’re likely to feel nauseous at the mere mention of the word essay. I, on the other hand, am rather fond of this humble workhorse. […and now I’ve tried at least three times to finish this paragraph. I have fairly strong feelings on how best to teach essay writing, and it’ll take more effort than I have time for tonight to turn my thoughts into sensible, non-ranty sentences, so I’ll save it for some time later this month. There’s probably something ironic there, but I don’t much care.]

Anyway, *My*NoWriMo (the ‘No’ now stands for ‘Non-fiction’), as I’m envisioning it now, will be an essay-a-day sort of thing. There’s no reason I have to stick to the official word-count of 50,000, but I do want to make it reasonably challenging, so I’ve arbitrarily decided to go with 1000 words a day (for a total of 30,000 words in November). Whether this will be one 1000-word essay, two 500-word essays, or half a 2k-er every day, I won’t know until I get into it.

I’m more excited about this project than I ever thought I would be about anything with a required word-count. Nevertheless, given my horrible track record with deadline-driven essay-writing, I’m curious to see how long this feeling will last. Will I make it through the whole month? The first week? The first day? Time will tell. Wagers, anyone?

If I come up with anything worth reading, I might post some of them here, but I’m not promising anything.

Ok, seven minutes until November. I’ll start at midnight and knock out the first hundred words or so just to get into the swing of things, but then I need to do my China reading and get to bed. Class in eight hours, woo!

Tags: writing

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