Wednesday 1 September 2004

Pic of the day: Dubious muses. Screenshot from The Sims. (Probably one of my last such. Sims2 is slated to arrive on the 16th.)

2 months till NaNoWriMo

What can I say? I don't usually think that far ahead. It feels like blasphemy to me, like shouting to God: "Nyah nyah! You can't stop me!" It is not that I totally disregard the future. I buy extra food before days where the shops are closed. I don't spend all my money on payday. I check that a reasonable amount of tax is withheld. These are simple human obligation, and I have had the time to get used to them. But planning anything two months in advance? Two months is enough for a perfectly healthy person to die a slow death from natural causes. You don't want to give God, Fate or the Universal Consciousness ideas by trying to poke around in the future.

And of course there's the small point that my interests vary over time. Something may seem like a fixture of my life, such as playing DAoC, and then suddenly I'm playing CoH instead. I was convinced that I would play Daggerfall when I retired from work, if I lived that long. Now I only have 1 computer left that can play Daggerfall, and no wrist that can. So, as the saying goes, "the best laid plans of mice and men ..."

But what I can say is that I have once again looked up the NaNoWriMo website. The forums were still there, and I sniffed around. It was very much like the good old days, and good they were, except for the pain in my hand and arm. Of course, if I try to write 50 000 words in a month again, I will hurt just as bad again, probably worse. Unlike some wines, wrists rarely improve with age.

Well, that's 50 000 more words than usual, really. I see that Al Schroeder has virtually abandoned his own five year old journal, the Nova Notes, to concentrate on his online comic. Could I do the same? It doesn't look like it. I write less than I used to, but I still try vainly to catch up.

But even if I stopped writing my journal I could not write a 50 000 words novel. Even with word completion and speech recognition software, I would wear out my wrist and my throat and still not reach it. I really tried last year and got a little over halfway. I've lost two years in a row, and I intend to lose again. It was still fun, and probably will be again, if I am here and have the necessary body parts to participate. If there's one thing I've learned from watching Hikaru no Go, it is that the most important thing is not to win but to have a cute rival. Oh wait, that was from reading Hikaru no Go fanfiction by girls. But even so...

Sometimes the only way to lose is to not play.