Wednesday, June 29, 2011

SoCNoC 2011 - a different route

This June started out busy. Over the first few days, I wasn't sure if I should even attempt SoCNoC (The Southern Cross Novel Challenge - write a 50,000 word novel in the month of June).

By the time the 23rd rolled around and the month was mostly gone, I decided that I couldn't possibly write a novel. I was writing lots of other things though, and just for fun, I went onto the CARM forums, where I've been spending a lot of time lately debating God, Religion, evolution, creationism and various minutia in and around the absurdity that is modern religion and went through all of my posts (they provide a link for this, which made it very easy) and cut and pasted everything I wrote (didn't count quoting other people) into a document and tallied up my word count. The number was big...really big, something like 35,000 words. When I took my Theist versus Atheist posts and Casual Atheism posts from facebook, my count was over 40,000 words of discussion, argument, logic and mis-speak.

Just to be sure, I checked on the Kiwiwriters forums, to make sure that making SoCNoC non-fiction and mostly random wasn't "against the rules", and sure enough, the other executive were ok with me doing what I was doing.

Over lunch today at work, I collected from June 23rd to today and re-tallied the total. I hit 52,466 words in June. That's well past the required 50k words.

It is the most incoherent "novel" I've ever written, but if I wanted to, it could turn into a book about atheism and religion.

Two things occur to me:
1. I'm writing a novel's worth of posts every month (most likely), since I didn't, in any way, plan to hit 50,000 words and
2. I really need a life!