      So today was the first day of my first time to participate in the annual National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It's a cool international initiative to get writers writing by creating the voluntary and intimidating deadline of committing 50,000 words of fiction to paper (or more likely, to the hard drive) in just 30 days. While such a grueling pace is unlikely to produce the most polished of prose, it's a wonderful exercise for excessive putzers like me to simply WRITE IT DOWN, STUPID. You can always go back and fix it later.      The NaNoWriMo website offers scads of resources and support for participants, even opportunities to get together with--or merely interact online with--other enthusiastic writers in your area or around the world. You can share your work, or your growing word count, or nothing at all with other participants, but even after one day I've found that a high bar, even a totally arbitrary one, will likely be a good thing for my writing. I've dusted off a story idea I've had lying around for ages, and I made more progress on it today than I have in years of staring at it in my "must get to someday" file. Today's count: 1,535 words--a little short of what I'll need to crank out each day if I want to end up w/ 50,000 on November 30th. I won't be posting the whole blessed thing daily, but I've added today's work after the "Read more" jump below--what will be the Prologue--for anyone foolish enough to be interested. It's tentatively titled "Working for the Man," and although it's still in the early throes of its infancy, please remember that this is still copyrighted work.
