NaNoW­riMo is just over 52 hours away as I write this. I’m incred­i­bly excited. I’ve only done this once before, in 2006, and it was a blast. If you’ve never tried it, the point is to get as many peo­ple together around the world as pos­si­ble to sup­port each other as they each try to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of Novem­ber. That’s only 1,668 words a day, 30 days in a row, doesn’t seem all that impossible.

It’s every bit as hard as it sounds. In ‘06 I started off strong, over 3,000 words the very first day, but I hit a wall about mid­way into week 2, com­pletely blocked and mis­er­able. I fought back, and squeaked in on the very last day, fin­ish­ing with less than 51,000 words by mid­night, Novem­ber 30. It’s tough, but I’ve never had so much fun writing.

The great thing about NaNoW­riMo is that you have to turn off all your inter­nal fil­ters. You just write, no time for sec­ond guess­ing or won­der­ing if it’s good enough. Para­dox­i­cally, this often leads to amaz­ing break­throughs as your inner voice shines through with­out hav­ing all the magic wrung from it by your con­scious fil­ter. My ‘06 project was a Mars novel, and I wrote some amaz­ing things that even­tu­ally I’d like to revisit and make into a pub­lish­able book (at the very least, add in all the punc­tu­a­tion I left out because I was typ­ing too damn fast).

This year is Ghost Ronin, the final ver­sion of what my long­time read­ers have seen as In Shin­ing Armor. I’ve changed a lot of the story, brought it kick­ing and scream­ing into the Post-​Dubya 21^st cen­tury, and I expect a wild ride. A nan­otech­no­log­i­cally enhanced Army Ranger turned Zen assas­sin fight­ing to save the world. Yee ha.

And of course, because I can’t do any­thing the quiet, sim­ple and easy way, in addi­tion to mak­ing my daily word counts and hold­ing down my day job, I’ll be blog­ging about the whole expe­ri­ence here. I don’t know if I’m going to have time to keep up the fre­quency of posts on tech­nol­ogy and pol­i­tics, my other two pas­sions, but if writing’s your thing, I hope the pages of this blog will be both enter­tain­ing and instruc­tive through­out Novem­ber. And I invite you to join me. If you’ve ever thought about writ­ing a novel, even if just to see if you can do it, this is your chance. Head on over to the offi­cial National Novel Writ­ing Month web­site for all the deets, and I’ll see you back here to start the adven­ture in just a few days.

For me, this elec­tion is essen­tially over. I dropped by one the early polling places (two, actu­ally) yes­ter­day and cast my vote for Barack Hus­sein Obama (and Joe Biden, Mark Udall for Colorado’s sen­ate seat and Ed Perl­mut­ter for my con­gres­sional dis­trict). I voted at the sec­ond polling sta­tion because the line at the first one was a good fifty meters long at least, most of that peo­ple two or three abreast. And this is early vot­ing, a full week before elec­tion day.

Turnout is amaz­ing this year. Looks very good for democ­racy. Nor­mally I’d slide into a rant about how the Dems are all about voter turnout and the Repub­li­cans, in the last sev­eral elec­tions, have done every­thing they can to sup­press voter turnout, pre­vent the peo­ple from mak­ing their will known. But I’m in such a good mood, I’ll just give that a pass.