November is Novel Month

We have embarked on our toughest adventure yet. It is one that won't take us out of the house, but will push us to our emotional and personal limits. We are writing a novel together. That is right. We are going to sit down every night together in front of the computer and knock out at least 1666 words a night (yes, the sign of the devil can be found in that number).

You might be asking how and why did two intelligent people decide to embark on this type of journey since their thinking process is so different from each other. How will they be able to work together every night when they both have such different views on how a story should be written? All good questions since we are both wondering the same thing.

A month ago while we were driving around the island when Mary informed me that she had a great idea that was fun and something we could do together. She had found a website describing national novel writing month. After looking at her with a bewildered look and wondering how this was going to be fun, we decided to try our luck.

Tonight was our first stab at being the next Hemingway. To say things did not start off well is an understatement. Within 13 minutes of writing our novel my fun meter was pegged and I was ready to drink my wine and just be the typist. I had this vision of spending the first two nights setting the stage and working on the female lead's character development, moving on to the male lead on Wednesday, and then maybe by Friday introducing the character that would disappear and draw our two characters into a Hart to Hart type mystery (the two leads are married by the way). Within the third paragraph Mary had already thrown in the disappearance and completely thrown me off my game plan. Once that occurred the writing stopped, my temper rose, and I was told I was no fun.

I am happy to report that after a few minutes of cooling down the writing began again and we were able to complete our writing assignment for the night. We have set an hour each night to complete the task, and while we went over by ten minutes this evening, we are looking forward to accomplishing our goal.

For those of you wondering the working title is simply, Hell novel: A Tale of a Divorce in Progress.