Check Your Calendars

Yes, friends, if you’ll look to your monthly time keeping tool of choice, you’ll see that it’s almost November. In addition to the thankful end of the interminable election campaign, that also means it’s time for . . .

That’s right, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, during which intrepid souls like myself attempt to produce a novel (or at least the first 50,000 words of it). This will be the fifth year I’ve taken part.

Which means that, like last year, Feeding the Silence will essentially go dark for the month. Focusing on the novel writing last year got me to the NaNo goal of 50,000 words, even though the project cratered shortly thereafter. As it happens, the idea I was working on last year was really more of a short story thing than a novel. I still need to go back and salvage the good parts.

Ironically, this year is flipped around, with my NaNo project being something I originally tried to flesh out as a short story. I think it will work much better in a longer format, so we’ll see.

What’s it about? Let’s just say it plays on the idea that, historically, many West Virginia elections have involved the participation of the dearly departed. But that’s just the underlying idea – we’ll see how it all pans out.

Wish me luck and I’ll see y’all in December!