Wednesday, November 11, 2009

National Novel Writing Month - Progress Report #1

Boy, do I have egg on my face. Or something. I have not been what you would call equal to the task of National Novel Writing Month. With a goal in mind of 50,000 words, one has to average 1667 words per day to make that happen. I have been working on something, but my daily average over the first ten days is a scant 723 words, which is a bit less than 1000 words per day less than where I need to be to have 50,000 by the end of the month. To get there at this point, my new daily average would have to be 2139 words; and while 1667 is attainable, 2139 is on the order of Herculean - for me, at any rate. If it were the only thing I were working on, it might be possible; but that would leave off blog posts and probably severely curtail reading time. Not sure that’s a sacrifice I want to make - though probably some of you would be okay with seeing fewer blog posts from me!

So far, I have a story about a documentary filmmaker of mixed Israeli and Arab (maybe Palestinian, I’m not sure) descent who sits down for an interview with the sitting President of the United States and then asks a question that is totally off the wall and that had not been vetted prior to the interview. The President does not give an answer, and the interview is quickly terminated - but afterwards, both men find themselves thinking back on the interview and evaluating the paths they have taken in life that brought them to that specific point. The President is a loose caricature of George W. Bush, but the filmmaker is a complete invention - although for some reason, I see Isaac Hayes in my head whenever I picture this character - Isaac Hayes with sunglasses in a nice Italian suit. That’s not the right image, but that’s what I see so far.

I don’t have a great deal of confidence that I’ll be able to get out to 50,000 words by the end of the month, but hey - you never know. I’ll keep plugging away at it and see what happens. Maybe I’ll surprise myself!

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