NANOWRIMO

I received an email yesterday reminding me that November is the month during which those who sign up are challenged to write 50,000 words.  See NANOWRIMO website.  

This is no mean task: it works out to writing 2,500 words a day for twenty days, =50,000 words assuming one works on the basis of a normal five day work week.  The website provides writers working on their individual novels with a sense of community that most writers do not have and might miss.  I thought of signing up as a challenge to finish a spy novel on which I have been working for some months, tentatively titled Operation Kashgar.  I have posted some of it on this site and more on a website for writers, AUTHONOMY.

But there are two other writing projects that clamor for attention right now.  Together they might add up to 50,000 words, but they are not novels or short novels, they are plays.  Every writer knows that if you write you must listen to the little voice inside.  The plays will be a re-writing of Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away, A Play; for this I have had the benefit of a dramatized reading with comments submitted by the audience as well as readings I myself did before smaller audiences.  The other is a dramatization that I have in mind of the investigations of Judge Dee.  He was a real life figure from the Tang dynasty during which he rose from a county magistrate to the position of something like the Chief Justice of Metropolitan Chang-an (or Xi-an, both names for the Tang capital).  His investigations have been "written up" by a gifted Dutch diplomat, Robert van Gulik, who died in 1967, see website.  

Judge Dee's cases have a devoted following much as Rumpole or Hercule Poirot do, although the medium is different.  Hence, reluctantly, I will not register with NANOWRIMO, but I welcome the challenge and hope to have written or re-written 50,000 words by the end of this month.