If it weren’t for National Novel Writing Month, I would likely still be in denial that it is already November. But here we are again, November first, day one of NaNoWriMo madness. This is my fourth time participating, and I went back and forth on whether or not I should. It wasn’t a question of time because I just finished my first semester of grad school in Australia, and the academic schedule means summer and holidays are rolled into one insanely long break. My schedule is, for the first time in a very long time, wide open.

But the thing about grad school is I have to write a dissertation. I spent a large chunk of my first semester doing research and I’m now at the point where I should start writing. So while I love NaNo, my brain told my heart that I should be practical and work on my thesis project because time has this way of getting away from us.

I’m not always the most practical person, however.

That is why I have decided to dedicate this month to writing. Writing, writing, and more writing. I’m doing NaNoWriMo and tweeting about it daily. I also just found out about the first ever Academic Book Writing Month. As I’ve mentioned before, I feed off of the excitement and inspiration from fellow writers. By participating in both events, I hope to stay motivated to write daily, even when I get stuck on dialogue or can’t stand to look at another footnote. As I am writing, whether it be fiction or academic, I’ll be tracking the progress on Twitter using #NaNoWriMo and #AcBoWriMo. Please follow along, or better yet, join me. Let’s all make the clackity noise.

Ecriture Infinie is a fascinating art project by Bili Bidjocka.

I thought it would be interesting to design a project around an authorless book, in which everyone would have written something. Its purpose is the process. Writing is interesting because it is a process.

Described as an interactive installation that celebrates and ritualizes the passage from handwriting to digital writing, Bidjocka’s oversize notebooks have been traveling the world, inviting people to write on the blank pages “as if theirs were the last words to be written by hand”.

Read more about the project on www.ecritureinfinie.org.

As I try to get back on track with daily writing (after failing to complete 100 Days), I am inspired by the words of other writers whose work I admire.

Write all the time, hone your voice, and make sure that you have a way of saying something that is yours and yours alone. Find a way to stand out. Be funny and be different. Live a life that gives you lots of stories. Love and laugh and make friends and get your heart broken and have stuff be messy and weird and sometimes too extreme. But make sure you write about it. Figure out how you feel about it. Write constantly, and be brave with your words.

— Pamela Ribon, Your Parents Will Never Wish You This Life

I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen!

— Jennifer Egan, The Days of Yore interview

Writers are thieves. We steal moments and memories and now we steal minutes, too. We scramble for extra seconds and shove them in our pockets when no one is looking. If you want to write, you make it work. You make time. There’s really no other way.

— Tahereh Mafi, Stealing Time to Make a Schedule

Finding your voice, finding courage, finding time…these are common struggles for me. Where do you find inspiration for writing?

[P]ublishing, while far from dead, has not moved in one great big step from the world of ink and trees to that of pixels and tablets. Many small, sometimes halting, sometimes diverging paths are being followed, more or less simultaneously and with fascinating results. Digital publishing, it turns out, isn’t so much a second print run (as it seemed at first) as a whole other ecosystem, with a unique atmosphere, strange new rain patterns, and its own troubling signs of pollution and climate change. Diving into it means learning how to breathe all over again.

— Mandy Brown, Three

Further reading: The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane

Starting today, I’m joining Kathryn in 100 Days of Writing.

Here’s the deal. Out of the next 110 days, I will write for 100 of them (or declare myself a 100 Days of Writing Failure). I can skip any days I want, but starting today, I’ve got to hit 100 out of the next 110.

For a day to count as a Day of Writing, I must do one of the following:

1. write a completed piece (blog posts count, but emails, no matter how lengthy, do not);
2. write (or revise) for a minimum of 30 minutes; or
3. write a minimum of 500 words

I tend to do better with a set goal or deadline, plus it’s great motivation to be writing/talking about writing/struggling with writing with others (see: NaNoWriMo). My current thought is to use this project to write more short-short stories, revise my novel(s), and catch up on my Japan blog (again). My end date: May 9.

Near the end of National Novel Writing Month, GalleyCat announced a student designer was taking requests for book covers. That designer was Fena Lee, and I jumped at the opportunity to see what she would design for The Book of Coroc. I didn’t give her much to go with other than the somewhat vague description I had hastily written earlier in the month for my “Novel Info” section.

Xan is just a girl in the big city, trying to make ends meet. But all that changes when a mysterious book comes into her possession, along with a green-eyed stranger of few words and a price on her head from another world. Xan must learn how to harness the powers of the book if she is to save her world and many others from the Silver Queen and her army of tech clones.

The result:

After a month filled with frenzied writing, a rising urge to delete everything, and buckets of coffee, it is pretty amazing to see a visual interpretation of my concept. Kudos to Fena on the cover and the idea to use NaNoWriMo to hone her skills and build her portfolio. Be sure to check out all of her covers and submit your own novel if you participated.

Here’s one for the Scrabble lovers—eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels. It means “beautiful thinking”, and it’s also the title of a book by Canadian poet Christian Bök, in which each chapter uses only one vowel.

Bök (pronounced book, fittingly enough), said Eunoia “proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language.” Here is an excerpt for ‘o’, which I particularly enjoy because it’s all about books:

Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books. Books form cocoons of comfort – tombs to hold bookworms. Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth. Dons who work for proctors or provosts do not fob off school to work on crosswords, nor do dons go off to dorm rooms to loll on cots. Dons go crosstown to look for bookshops known to stock lots of top-notch goods: cookbooks, workbooks – room on room of how-to-books for jocks (how to jog, how to box), books on pro sports: golf or polo. Old colophons on schoolbooks from schoolrooms sport two sorts of logo: oblong whorls, rococo scrolls – both on worn morocco.

For a closer look, check out the text or flash versions, or listen to Bök read aloud from the ‘i’ chapter:

Literary culture isn’t a temple, it’s an ecosystem. Writers can be readers, readers can be critics, critics can be writers, audiences can have a voice.”

—Carolyn Kellogg, 12 reasons to ignore the naysayers: Do NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner, and I’m super geeked. I’m not the only one:

Hello Wrimos.
Look at your novel, now back to mine, now back at your novel, now back to MINE.
Sadly, it isn’t mine, but if you started writing 1667 words a day it could be as long as mine.
Look down, back up, where are you? You’re at your computer WITH THE NOVEL YOUR NOVEL COULD LOOK LIKE.
What’s in your hand? Back at me. It’s the remains of your silenced inner editor.
Look again.
THE EDITOR IS NOW DIAMONDS!
Anything is possible with NaNoWriMo.
I’m on a forum.

— Hero, via Something Magic

If you’re also NaNo-ing this year, feel free to add me. If you’re still debating whether or not to NaNo, stop. Hammer time. Sign up, it’s a month of fun, mad writing with people all over the world. In the meantime, let’s start working “the editor is now diamonds” into everyday conversations.

savethewords.org from Oxford Dictionaries

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved, and unwanted.

If you love words as much as we do, find room for them again in conversation and written communication. Each time you use one of these words, you are keeping it alive in the English language.”

I like traboccant, murklins, and kalotypography so much I just adopted them. What words will you save today?