creative... No, I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo this year. (Although
kadyg is. And I'm sure many of you guys are, as well.) Let me explain.You may recall that back in the prehistoric days of the Internet -- we geologists like to call it the epoch of "2003" -- I set myself a challenge that came to be known as BaMoTTuSto, Bax's Month of TTU Stories. The end result was an unqualified success: One story a day consistently, except for Thursdays, which gave me an impossible work turnaround.
Fast forward to this year. I'm currently flipping between two part-times jobs adding up to a ~50-hour, six-day workweek. I've gotta do something for November, but a novel like 2004's is out of the question. So the thought comes up ... why not resurrect my short-story variation?
I didn't say anything about it, because I wasn't at all certain how far I'd get; I figured I'd just plunge in and explain myself along the way. And I'm rather glad now I didn't give people a big build-up and raise expectations, because after the first two days, dead silence so far.
On the other hand ... by the original BaMoTTuSto standards, this month is already a success.
Day Number Three's piece turned into a monster. What started as a quick magazine blurb turned into a feature article, then a chronicle ... I ran to the Web for hours of research, polishing it up, breathing life into a ship full of people I'd meant to be a one-off. Six thousand five hundred words so far for my throwaway culturalia, and I'm still one to two days from being finished! By itself, this single story passes my "minimum output" threshold for BaMoTTuSto One ... so I'm not giving up on 11/2006 yet, by any means.
In the meantime, I keep hitting little digressions ... like trying to make up a card game on the fly for a ship full of bored mages to play. I spent today writing down the full rules. I can't find a place to wedge it in to the article or the e-mail convo that's serving as a package for my slice-of-TTU-life pieces, so I'll just present it as a piece of bonus material tonight.