I have not had time to post here in a while. My new job has kept me very busy and most of the time when I get home I just want to relax and spend time with my girlfriend. It is a little frustrating that I have fallen behind on personal projects (like this site), but the work is fulfilling so that is OK.
All that being said, it really nags at me. I haven’t had a chance to bring comments back online here yet, primarily because I realized that before I do that I should probably update the code of this site for Django 1.0 which was recently released. This site is currently running off of Django trunk, unfortunately in the midst of moving and switching jobs I’m several months behind and there are some major revisions that occurred during that time. It won’t be a trivial task, so I wouldn’t expect it to get done right away. So comments will continue to be disabled until the rewrite is done. You are always welcome to contact me, or comment on FriendFeed in the meantime.
The other reason that the rewrite is going to be delayed is that I’ve decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. This is actually going to be a serious challenge because it looks like November is already going to be a busy month for me and squeezing out 50,000 words at the same time is going to be rough. However, my right brain is feeling lonely and coding projects just aren’t satisfying my urge to do something creative. I don’t really want to get into a debate of the merits of people cranking out a word count during a month rather than focusing on writing really well. That’s a subject for another time. The way I’m looking at NaNoWriMo is that it’s a kick in the ass for me to get my act together, stop talking about writing, and just write.
I’ve actually attempted NaNoWriMo once before, but I kept it a secret at the time because I was afraid of publicly failing to meet the goal. Consequently, I used that as an out to procrastinate and not get anything done beyond the first few pages. Deadlines don’t matter if there is no consequence for failing to meet them, and I don’t want to fall into that trap again. This year, I plan to be very open and public about how I’m doing during NaNoWriMo, both by posting to the official NaNoWriMo site, as well as posting here and on Twitter. I’ll try to provide an update once a week here, and Twitter posts will appear with the same level of randomness they always do.
If you haven’t ever participated in National Novel Writing Month and you have the urge to write, but can’t seem to bring yourself to get it done, consider signing up this year. Post how you are doing online, and we can go on this journey together. Maybe we succeed, maybe we don’t, but we’ll learn a lot about ourselves as writers in the meantime.