I'm back, did you miss me? I didn't log on once in Portland.I didn't want to, but even if I had, Christi's parents forgot to pay their ISP bill. Anyway, there's 830 messages in my inbox, and most of it is spam. My isp sucks so much that not only do they not block anything, they actually have open relays, so they get blocked by other people. So my dad's company marks my email as spam and he never sees it.

I might talk about Portland in the morning. But I'll talk about National Novel Writing Month right now. The goal is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words between November 1 (it's not too late to start) and midnight on November 30. I'm a bit over 5500, but my reading grade level is only something like 3.8. I think that's below even newspaper articles. Anyway, I've mostly written plot and dialog, so I'll have to make the descriptions a bit more challenging I guess. It's a young adult type novel, about freshmen girls in highschool having relationships. I think what really sets my novel apart from Sweet Valley High is that the girls are having relationships with each other.

Christi wants me to post it as it's own blog, but that's a problem because earlier scenes get description added to them, such as what the school uniform looks like, so it's not getting written all in order. Anyway, I think she's just concerned that I'm writing it on her laptop. I think it might boast the only copy of microsoft word in the house. Not that i've got fancy markup, but it does count my words and tell me that I've apparently sunk to three monasyllabic word sentences. Christi told me to throw in words like "ontology" to raise my reading score. I remeber reading Sweet Valley High in fourth and fifth grade, so it's possible my reading level is on target.

You (yes, you) should sign up. If you can write for twenty days, you only have to write 2500 words a day. That sounds like a lot, but you can invent some formulaic charecters and they practically describe themselves, taking up many words. (think "quantity.") Start throwing in people like queer teenagers coming out or snake handlers or hichiking bikers dressed as nuns. I bet you can already think of 2500 words about each of them. Great, now put them in a line at a truckstop waiting for the bathroom when something happens that throws them all together somehow. An earthquake! A fire! Alien invasion! All three at the same time! The alien spacecraft alone will eat up another day's quota. Ok, now the charecters are interacting. The fundamentalist snake handler is condeming the queer teens when one of the snakes escapes and bites the biker nuns. It's poisonous, but God saves her, so she decides to be a real nun. The fundamentalist is even more upset, but the aliens abduct him for a nasal probe and decide he should be an exhibit in their museum of intolerance. One of the queer teens falls for one of the bikers and the other queer teen is upset and starts a fire with his/her cigarette by accident because it's the first time s/he's smoked, but it just seemed like the thing to do under the circumstances. The deus ex machine.... i mean the aliens extinquish it. The teens and the bikers decide they should start their own convent/commune and start their own religion based on alien teachings. An earthquake strikes their cathedral but they rebuild and live happily ever after. See how easy it is. Now just fill in the details. If you had enough lesbian chaecters and you are a lesbian (yes, you), there was a time you could sell this novel to naiad press and they would print it and you would see it with it's glorious two color cover in the remainder bin at Buns and Noodle. But I think Naiad is no more. Anyway, any of you are free to snap up that plotline above, since I don't think I'll be using it.