Well, there’s one week ’til the start of National Novel Writing Month.

You’ll be pleased to know that I do have an idea for my novel. It could be 175 pages worth of idea. Let’s hope…

I’m going to write a mystery. The idea is the combination of a suggestion from Dad, current D.C. events, and general answers to my late night questions provided by Rudi.

I have a protagonist. I have a victim. I don’t have a perpetrator yet, but I’m sure I’ll be surprised as I go along.

My goal for the month is to write every day. I have lots of fun things planned for the month of November, so I’m not going to stress about the word/page count. If I get to 175 pages or 50,000 words, that’ll be great. But if not, that’ll be fine, too. I have a bad habit of abandoning things that I can see clearly aren’t going to work out, so I want to remove that impediment from the start. If my goal is merely to write something — anything — for 30 days, that seems accomplishable and easy to rebound from if I slip off the wagon. If I were to stick with the official rules and didn’t write the necessary 5 pages a day to stay on track, I could see abandoning the project after the first weekend in November.

So, I’m starting the typing exercises. Warming up the computer. Clearing the extraneous stuff from the schedule. But also keeping it realistic and fun and meaningful in the long run.