NaNoWriMo

                        Gorgeous cherry blossoms in a neighbourhood garden.

I've signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, although it's really International Novel Writing Month now, so many people are doing it all round the world. 
   The idea is that every day for all of November, you will write something. You WILL work on that novel that you've always said you had inside you, the one that you meant when you said "I could write a better novel than that!" or "Why the hell was that trash even published?" as you threw the book you'd just given up on across the room. The goal is to have 50,0000 words by the end of November, which will be your novel (a short one) or the beginning of a longer novel. You will probably not win the Booker or the Pulitzer Prize or even the Nobel Prize for Literature, but you will have something.       Just as an aside, have you ever thought that no comic novel ever wins these great prizes? The novels that win are all deadly serious, about deadly serious subjects, (the Holocaust, racism, the Outsider figure, War, etc etc.) but is not comedy part of the human condition as much as tragedy? Why is it considered inferior by the judges of these competitions? Some of the greatest novelists of the English language included humour in their novels - Dickens, Austen and Thackeray to name just three. Sure, David Copperfield isn't a riot of belly laughs, but there are comic characters as well as the evil ones, just to balance things out, and one of the funniest scenes in all literature has to be Elizabeth Bennett's final interview with the ridiculously pompous Lady Catherine de Burgh. "I do not bid you good-day. I send no compliments to your mother. I am most seriously displeased".
   So, if nothing else, NaNoWriMo has us thinking about The Novel. What does writing and reading mean to us? Why this urge to put it down on paper, to share our thoughts with people we may never meet? 
  I'll keep you posted.