I’m going to write a book in November. That sounds pretty ridiculous, considering I’ve never finished a book in my life (despite repeated attempts), and November – while not a short month – is not a reasonable time-frame. But I’m not the only one planning to do this, and nor am I expecting it to be a good book – more of a fictional blog. I’ve signed up for the pleasantly concatenated National Novel Writing Month, in which chumps and wannabes claim they will pen 50,000 words in thirty days flat. Interesting things about this are that the site itself tracks the cumulative word count of everyone involved so far, and a few of us are planning to launch our works in the extraordinary blacklibrary.

You’ll notice I sound optimistic, and also that this patently isn’t going to work. True enough, but there is one not entirely unrealistic expectation that appeals to me: I might end up writing the story I have in mind into a novella, way short of the word minimum but getting to the ultimate point. The plot is something that rose from the ashes of my old book, which was floored by a fatal flaw in the sci-fi reasoning. This new one is a sci-fi private detective type of yarn, and not as fanciful in some ways as the basics of the last one, but larger in scale and more diverse. The weird thing about it is that I haven’t written a word. Usually I start these things soon after having the idea, then stop for months at a time after every chapter. I think the main thing stopping me from writing a book is the way that I stop writing books or don’t start them at all. Solving that would really help.