Books

Novel Completed; Notebook Recovered

This has been a landmark day. Just after midnight, Morgen and I both crossed the 50,000-word mark in our respective novels, thus making us winners in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (see this post).

NaNoWriMo 2005 winner icon

I think I can safely say this was some of my worst writing of all time. In keeping with the ethic of the competition, the focus was on quantity rather than quality, so that was pretty much the expected result. I think there were a few glimmers of inspiration here and there, and perhaps at some later date I’ll go through the manuscript, extract those few words, thoughts, and scenes, and make something else out of them. In the meantime, let me offer a quick F.A.Q. on my novel, since so many people have asked:

Q: What’s your novel about?

A: It’s about 50,000 words.

Q: Har har. No, seriously. What’s it about?

A: Hard to say. People have conversations, experience perilous situations, and mostly escape unharmed. Except those who don’t. And then they have more conversations.

Q: Yeah, but can you, like, actually synopsize the plot?

A: There was supposed to be a plot?

Q: Um, yeah. So maybe I could just read it and then I’ll tell you what it’s about.

A: No. You can’t read it. In fact, no one can read it. Ever. It’s that bad.

Q: Oh, come on. I’m sure it’s really good, even though you say it’s bad. Let me just have a quick look.

A: No frackin’ way. You may not read it in a house, with a mouse, in a boat, or with a goat.

Q: On a train, perhaps?

A: Not here, there, or anywhere. Sorry.

I hope that’s been helpful…

Meanwhile, another piece of exciting news today. This afternoon, BART’s lost and found department called to say they had the Moleskine notebook I lost more than five weeks ago. Shocking! I’d given up on it a long time ago. But I finally have it back—none the worse for the wear, either. A nice way to end the month.

An Afternoon in Provence

Yesterday afternoon, I had the great pleasure of meeting yet another of my literary heroes: Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence and it sequels, several novels, and a few delectable works of non-fiction. His latest book, which I bought yesterday, is Confessions of a French Baker: Breadmaking Secrets, Tips, and Recipes. Mayle wrote this book along with (and as a favor to) baker Gerard Auzet, whose bakery and bread featured prominently in A Year in Provence. It is what it sounds like: a guide to baking bread in the traditional French manner, but written for an audience of mere mortals in Peter Mayle’s inimitable style.

Peter gave a delightful presentation at Book Passage in Corte Madera (just north of San Francisco), where all the biggest writers seem to show up when in northern California. Afterward, when Morgen and I went up for the obligatory autograph (I do seem to be collecting an unusual number of those, don’t I?), I told him that his books had completely changed our eating habits and had been responsible for our taking multiple trips to France (he remarked that it looked good on us); few people can claim to have had such an influence on our lives. Judging by the other comments and questions I heard, he gets that sort of thing a lot.

What a life: kicking back in a comfy home in the south of France, surrounding yourself with incredible food and drink, and making a tidy living writing about your experiences. If Peter Mayle ever quits his job, I’ll be first in line to apply for the position.

Apple Fixes Mail, Annoys Author

In late September, I mentioned that I’d no sooner finished a draft of an ebook about .Mac than Apple went and changed the service, updated their Backup utility, and generally wreaked havoc on my schedule by forcing me to spend days rewriting. Specifically, they fixed a number of issues I’d complained about, so I had to take out my complaints and even add a compliment or two.

Incredibly, that’s just happened again. Today, while I was in the process of reviewing my editor’s first round of corrections to my forthcoming Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.3. This update includes about a dozen changes to Mail, which will cost me a morning of experimentation and rewrites. And yes, in all probability, the deletion of a few gripes. I hate it when they do that.

One thing I noticed right away after applying the update is that my rules no longer worked—at all. After a few panicked minutes of tests, I found the source of the problem: the MailTags plug-in, which enables you to add Spotlight-searchable metadata to your messages. Disabling the plug-in resolves the problem. I reported this to the developer, and hope that an update will be forthcoming. (Update: Just a few hours after my initial post, MailTags 1.1 was released; it fixes this problem and adds a long list of new features. Excellent.)

I will say this, though: When this new ebook comes out in a couple of weeks, it will be shockingly up-to-date!

National Novel Writing Month

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a Web site describing National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as it is known in the trade), which is held annually in November. Initially, I thought this might make a good Interesting Thing of the Day article, but the more I read, the more I became convinced that I should be a participant, rather than just an observer. And so, during the month of November, I’ll be writing a novel.

I will be one of roughly 50,000 participants this year. Since NaNoWriMo began in 1999, the numbers have steadily grown to the point where it’s a worldwide phenomenon. NaNoWriMo novelists are looking for quantity, not necessarily quality. The event’s founder, Chris Baty, arbitrarily declared 50,000 words to be the threshold for success. The point of this exercise is not to win the Pulitzer prize or even to get published; it’s to make good on that promise most of us have made to ourselves at some point in our lives: “One of these days, I’m going to write a novel.”

The rules are simple: You must not write even a single word before 12:00:01 a.m. on November 1, and you must stop by 11:59:59 on November 30. You can write in whatever genre, and on whatever topic, you wish—as long as it’s fiction. NaNoWriMo’s servers will validate your word count, but as to what you write, you’re on the honor system—you could “win” by writing “a” 50,000 times. Of course, there are no prizes; it’s all about personal achievement. So participants have little incentive to cheat. Local and regional groups meet during the month at cafés and pubs for “write-ins”; participants also offer each other support and encouragement virtually in online discussion forums.

In order to reach 50,000 words (about 160 pages) in a month, one needs to write, on average, just under 1,700 words per day. Because I make my living writing, it’s a rare day when I write fewer words than that, so I’m not particularly concerned about sheer quantity. But I’ve never written fiction, so that will be the challenge.

Needless to say, it’s not as though I had nothing else to do in November. I have articles and ebooks to edit, programming to do for Interesting Thing of the Day, and a long list of personal projects I’ve been putting off since June. In the grand scheme of things, writing the short, first draft of a first novel that will probably never be published is not among my top priorities in life right now. And yet, somehow, it seems like the right thing to do. Some of the best decisions I’ve made in life were ostensibly irrational but just felt right, and I’m expecting this to turn out the same way.