Librarian's holiday

Two perspectives on National Novel Writing Month, of which we have just passed the halfway point: blogger Eric Rosenfield hates it. And from the Wenatchee World -- a newspaper from the apple-growing country in the middle of Washington state, a large town with an Amtrak station but no freeway -- I've been through it a few times -- comes this wonderful piece, Writer's goal — 50,000 words in one month, with echoes of The Onion befitting its small-town provenance.

"You can't write a novel in a month. Nobody can. Well, maybe a few people can. But I can't," said Anderman, who is making the attempt for the fourth consecutive year. ... There's no time to polish and improve when you're trying to pound out nearly 2,000 words in a night in few available free hours. "It gave me a lot of respect for writers. Every one of the books on these shelves is probably five times bigger than it looks," he said, gesturing to thousands of books in the library where he paused from work for an interview Tuesday afternoon. He referred to the many rewrites it takes to make a good book.

Yes, the guy is a librarian.

The book I'm working on now started as a NaNo two years ago. I managed about 20,000 words that November of 2004. I liked what I'd done too much to hurry through it or give it up, and now I've done about three drafts of the first half of the book and I'm still working on finishing the first draft of the second half. I'm up to about 68,000 words, but they're a good tight 68,000 words.

More about this nascent work to come.

NaNoWriMo, Mational Novel Writing Month, Wenatchee