Every November, some people grow mustaches. Others bake pies. I disappear into a laptop and try, once again, to write a novel (technically, the first 50,000 words of one) in thirty days. This will be my ninth year participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the new politically correct “NovNov, sponsored by ProWritingAid.com” or what my coworkers call “that time of year when Darrin begrudginly takes a week off-grid and comes back all miserable and tanned.”
I treat it like a sacred pilgrimage and try to get all 50,000 words done during one solid week of vacation. I pack my tablet, charge my laptop, and check into a quiet vacation resort somewhere far from the dull hum of ticket queues and compliance meetings, knowing full well they’re still piling up and being held without me. My goal, however, is to rise early, write furiously, and emerge after nine days as something nobler than a tech-slob/cloud engineer: a novelist, a creator of worlds, a man who builds ideas with words… instead of … *cough* … Terraform.
For the first day or so, it actually works. I sit on a balcony overlooking the sea, inventing people who don’t exist in cities that never were. I get lost in it. The coffee cools, the phone stays dark, and for one glorious day, I feel like I’ve slipped through a portal into a life I could easily get used to.
Of course, after the two or three days, when the bartenders are familiar with the weird guy who sits at the cabana bar and types all day, little distractions creep in. I get wind of a crab shack up the beach that “needs exploring.” Someone tips me off about a local craft stout that “needs evaluating.” By day five, I’m so confidently in the “flow state” that I’ve got chess.com open in one window, the Indy NaNo Discord group in the other. I’m crossing 20,000 words, which is respectable, bordering on impressive; however, at this point, one of two things usually happens. I either hit that brick wall of vague ideas in the outline where I only wrote “something cool happens here,” or worse, I think up a better ending, spend half a day rewriting the outline, and the other half formatting it.
This year, because I don’t trust flying on a good day, much less during a government shutdown, I’ll, sadly, be skipping the tropics and heading for a casino resort a drivable distance away, with a couple of day’s stay in a remote lodge en route. Casino feels right, as this will be my second attempt at writing a heist novel, sort of a prequel to the sequel to last year’s project, which got derailed by the latter of the two previously mentioned tropes. Worse than just a new ending, I changed out philosophical themes.
It’s an amusing story, and not my fault. You see, I was derailed by a really nice retired couple from Vermont at happy hour one night. We got to talking — the way one does when the jacuzzi has a waitress — and they asked what I did. Normally, I’d say “Computer Geek” and watch their eyes glaze over, but as I was on vacation and a few drinks in, I just blurted out, “I’m writing a novel,” before I realized what I’d implied. I don’t think I ever actually explained the day job, because they lit up like I’d just told them I’d discovered a new planet.
They asked about my story. They nodded thoughtfully when I described my “very heisty” themes of cognitive vs. affective morality, whether AI can or should act with empathy, and how I had developed an equation for morality that, in theory, could be trained into real-world AI (Sq = ΔE × Cf). You know, topics best described as “social suicide,” or the reason I don’t get a lot of second dates. Surprisingly, in this case, they were both well-versed in philosophy, so instead of watching them glaze over, we had a two-hour philosophical discussion, with me arguing techno-ethics while they quoted all kinds of religious and philosophical citations about the role of suffering in morality and on morality vs. sin. It derailed my thinking for the rest of the book.
Anyway, they picked up my bar tab, left their contact info, “We can’t wait to read this book, send us a copy,” etc. Maybe they were just trying to get away from me after I ruined their vacation, but it was the most validation I’ve felt since … well … the previous November … when I was there and some baked parasailer asked why I’d brought a laptop to a beachside bar.
Unfortunately, after a blissful week pretending to be a Hemingway-like recluse, I come home to 500 unread emails, two dozen user requests, a system vulnerability that apparently couldn’t wait, and some angry voicemails from the owner of a technical publications app whose SSL Cert expired. Okay, the last one is fair, the cert does expire every November, and it’s not the first time I’ve forgotten to renew it before leaving. Point being, vacation is over, and now I get to pay for it. Suddenly, I’m nine days behind on everything, and I’ve gone from “the guy at the poolside bar with fascinating stories and deep ideas” to “the project’s main bottleneck” by the end of the 9 a.m. standup. Welcome back!
Come December, with luck, the heist will be pulled, the plot will be twisted, and fun will go back into the box until next November when I do this all again. My track record will be either 4-5 or 5-4 at winning the 50,000-word challenge, and there’ll no doubt be a sixth half-finished manuscript in my OneDrive folder, waiting for me to retire so I can revisit it. That’s the plan anyway. The head of a major publishing company once told me to keep doing this until I’m in my 60s, when I’ll be good enough to sell a few books. This way, I’ll have a stack of projects ready to polish and publish as part of a blissful post-tech life. So, between him and that couple from Vermont, I guess that’s three people who believe in me, anyway.
