National Novel Writing Month

Back in 2004, Chris Baty released a book called No Plot, No Problem, the premise of which was that you could write a novel in 30 days just by sitting down and doing it. He even proposed that all of us with the burning desire to write the next Great [insert country here] Novel should do it together, in November. And thus, the National Novel Writing Month was born.

This year, I am going to try my hand at NaNoWriMo as it is called. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days, or about 1600 words a day. The just bang it out school of novel writing. And I am pretty much going to do that. As of right now, I have not solid plot points, no real characters and no clue of what I am going to write about. But come Sunday, November 1, 2009, I am going to sit down and write. This is not to say I have not been preparing. I have watched a number of different TV shows, reviewed some of my favorite movies and reading up on plot points and story lines, but beyond that I am not going into this one with a lot of preconceived ideas. I am going to let it happen and see where it takes me. The great thing about this experiment is that I just have to finish. It does not have to be unified, relevant or organized (as an old English teacher used to grade). In fact, it never even has to see the light of day (other than for the obligatory word count).

So here we go! I have officially registered myself and if you want to follow along with my progress, you can. Send me encouragement, jibs and coffee and I will check back in December and let you know what fell out.

Crisis of faith?

I think I am having a crisis of faith. You will note that faith is lowercase. This has nothing to do with Faith...or maybe it does.

We encourage our children to be grounded and not to believe in fairy tales or Santa Claus because they are not real, yet we simultaneously encourage them to believe in God because its...um....er....

We encourage and reward critical thinking, yet there is only one section on philosophy in the book store and at least six sections on religion, specifically christianity (yes, I mean little C as in all encompassing).

We are told that God is loving and forgiving. That it has granted us free will, so that we can make our own decisions, unless we decide that there is no God, or if the loving God we choose to support and acknowledge is not exactly the same as someone else's God. We are told to love our fellow man, except that you are not to take that literally and actually love your fellow man, especially if they are the same sex. Now get out there and kill the hedonists (who worship the same God, just in a different fashion). And of course, creating a loving family that is outside the preconceived moral boundaries is just wrong, ignoring for the moment that a loving family is better than any dysfunctional family that falls within the moral boundaries.

I am taking liberties with words. Clearly, the word moral has lost its meaning in the modern society. It is no longer a philosophical term, but one of rigid dogma with little support behind it other than because we say so with the we being the group that yells the loudest.

Let me be clear. I am not opposed to religion per se. There are those that derive a great deal of support from it. I am also not opposed to being preached at, any more than I am opposed to having a beggar on the street ask me for money. But I do not have to listen to it and I am equally free to preach my dogma back. That is a natural right. However, I am opposed to being forced into one camp of belief or another. If I choose to believe that God is a large ball of twine, a little frayed on the edges from having been batted around by one too many cats, free will allows me to do this.

What is more important however, is not a belief, or lack there of, but how one lives one life, because I have met and witnessed a large number of devout individuals that quite frankly have already purchased express tickets to the lower levels of Hell (if you believe in that thing). More than anything, would you not think that is really what God would want us to do?