Well, this is it. The time is now. I have grabbed life by the testicles with both my tiny hands, and I'm squeezing for all I'm worth. The time has come for me to write a novel. A short novel, and not a very good one by any standards I'm sure, but that's beside the point. The point is, I haven't really produced anything creative in many, many, many months. Possibly a year. I do not like this. I haven't liked this for quite some time. I was sitting here, not liking it, some weeks ago when I came across a reference at Cat and Girl to something called National Novel Writing Month. Gosh, I thought. How entrancingly Quixotic! A quest against impossible odds, to churn out 50,000 words of unpolished prose in the course of a single month. It sent my blood pumping to all the places blood is supposed to pump to, I don't mind saying. Then, of course, I took a brief reality check. I'm a graduate student. I scarcely have time to eat, let alone write a novel. I'd just be setting myself up for a fall, I told myself, and passed it on by. Then I talked Chris Lake into sacrificing his life to the novelistic gods instead. And while it was oddly satisfying to cheat a man out of an entire month of his life, it also didn't seem sporting, somehow. I could hardly ask him to do anything I wasn't willing to do myself. So I pulled up my socks and popped down to the Victrola on Sunday the tenth and I wrote out 2,400 words and change, until I realised I had no idea what I was doing and would have to sleep on it. And thus did battle commence. I swear I shall, I shall I shall! See this out to the bitter end.

Today's wordage: 2436

Today's draft: 20021110