NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMoNaNoWriMoNaNoWriMo...NANOWRIMO!

Okay, so Novel Writing Month has begun, and I'm off to a start on my fantasy story Ascent with a tally of 1812 words. I'll keep a running tally here just like Slusser did when he participated in NaNoWriMo last year. That way, you can all cheer me on (or jeer at me, as the case may be) should you feel like it.

At this point, I'd like to try to make this enough of a habit that I can cut sown the amount of time I spend writing. I noticed as I wrote the beginning of the novel that despite having a pretty good idea of how I wanted to start, I wrote in a very halting fashion, pausing every few words to question the clarity of my sentence, whether I'd used the proper word to convey my meaning, and so on. I also paused quite a few times to consider details of the setting or how a character might do something. I've only written about two and a half pages, but it took me a fair amount of time to do that. I also have to keep reminding myself that, as proposed in Chris Baty's book No Plot? No Problem! this doesn't have to be any good. It's perfectly all right if it's all substandard, cliche, derivative drek. At the same time, I am trying to stretch myself in certain ways, and I want to be as original as I can manage. Anyway, it was fun, and I hope I can maintain my enthusiasm for this setting and story throughout this month.

Marilyn and I learned about an interesting website tonight while watching "Frontline." It's called Kiva.org. The idea is that people in Third World countries are trying to go into business for themselves, doing everything from making peanut butter to bricks to carpets to restaurants to, well, whatever they can make money doing, so they can provide for themselves, their families, and their communities. But these businesses require materials, and these materials cost money. The amount of money is significant for them, but for us Americans, it's the price of groceries for a week. Here's where the website comes into play: these entrepreneurs go to the website, entering information about themselves and their business, and listing the amount of money they need to do business. Then, on our side, a willing patron issues a "microloan" to the entrepreneur, covering their cost with the understanding that they will pay back the money as they can. The neat thing about the service - aside from the knowledge that you're using your cash to help someone out in a very real way - is that as your microloan is paid back, you can use it again to invest in yet another person's business, and so on.

I like the idea so much that I'm adding a link to the website on my blog. Right now, their servers have been overloaded by all of the people flooding in after seeing the spot on "Frontline," but hopefully they'll have things up and running again soon.

Finally, since my wife tells me that "everyone is doing it," here are my celebrity lookalikes. I don't see it, but you tell me: