dimfuture.net

Ah, November. The month when thousands of aspiring authors, amateur and deeply amateur alike, elect to punish themselves with the frantic output of National Novel Writing Month. The goal: to churn out fifty thousand words in a month, roughly approximating the completed first draft of a novella. Yes, let’s go ahead and do the joke: National Fifty Thousand Words In A Month Roughly Approximating the Completed First Draft of a Novella didn’t make good ad copy. And the domain name had already been taken by Taiwanese porn spammers. Such is life.

Anyway, desperate to fill out the sorely lacking “Writing” section of the blog (and to provide fresh bloggy content to all six-odd of you) while going on to “win” Nanowrimo for the third year in a row, I hit upon an idea. An idea so simple and brilliant you get one once in a lifetime. An idea so balls-out crazy it just might work. All right, so it’s a web comic. And the people at Nanowrimo thought of it first, but I didn’t know that at the time. So shut up.

Throughout National Novel Writing Month, I will be providing updates and musings on the process (”blogging the novel,” as I’ve seen it put, although the phrase, like most phrases involving “blogging,” makes me feel vaguely self-conscious and perhaps a bit gassy). I’ll generally be posting whenever the mood strikes me, or whenever I’m procrastinating on my fledgling novella… so the month of November will either echo with stony silence, or hit an all-time high of useless, frantic posts. And, at least once weekly, we’ll be featuring a Nanowrimo comic — written by me! And illustrated by the illustrious Reverend Matthew Kessen! Yeah, that’s right — who’s laughing now?

So please enjoy the first installment, fittingly entitled Act One: Hubris. There’s more like it to come! Actually, the Reverend and I had a conference, and we both decided that there should probably be funnier to come, so it won’t be exactly like this. And it might not be as wildly, unbelievably, testicle-slappingly hysterical as Nanowrimo’s own daily comic, but I can pretty much guarantee that ours will have way more profanity. Hey, look, it’s funnier than The Lockhorns, anyway, right? Huh? Yeah? Okay, that does it, get off my porch.

In the meantime, The Reverend Kessen will be keeping Dimfuture running with his excellent and insightful Godzilla Project. Among other things. Big, important things. Or so he tells me. I didn’t get this far by asking a lot of questions.
Enjoy!

John Scalzi has some terrific advice for teenaged writers, or, in fact, burgeoning writers of any age.