One novel. One month.

So it's a project from a group of Quad-Cities writers. One month. One novel. 50,000 words or more. Can it be done? Who's dumb enough to try such a thing?
Me.

As Dispatch-Argus Entertainment guru Sean Leary put it:
"November is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is for writers to pen an entire 50,000 word novel in the span of its 30 days. It's a daunting task, one that under the best circumstances would end in an extremely rough draft of a (hopefully) passable story. The most anyone could hope for is to get everything down so he or she could begin the arduous revision process of shaping that giant lump of coal into something resembling a diamond.
However, in the spirit of the month, that's the challenge I'm going to undertake and I invite you to do the same as part of the Quad-Cities November Novelists Group."

Check it out online at: http://groups.myspace.com/qcnovembernovelists.
Or you can go to www.seanleary.com and click on the "One Novel In One Month" icon and it'll take you there.

"A Constant Suicide" started as a short story my sophomore year in college. It sucked and I let it die.

Then, about a month ago, I was reading all of my old writing still on my computer and read some of it. "Wow, I used to know how to write," I said to myself.

Since I wrote the story, I became a newspaper reporter. My writing has gotten better, but the pure, uncensored emotion an angst-fueled teenager threw down on paper was (at least I thought) brilliant.

I've gone back to those times. It's escaping all social norms that have been embedded into me and going back to the days where I just sat in my room and wrote about nothing for hours.

November is the month I become a writer. Then I'll use my own money to self-publish. I'm the kind of person to make too many claims I don't follow up on. This blog is to keep me on track and in check. I'll be posting little tid bits here and there to see if there's any interest out there for such a thing.

It's igniting my love for composing stories that say something about myself and the society I live in.

Writing is my therapy.

It's my savior.

My own personal Jesus.