The Awkward World

…and one of the first steps is to tell everyone that you’re doing it so when week 2 gets here and you want to quit, you’ll stick with it because you don’t want everyone to think you’re a loser. And I’ll be honest – it just started, and I’m already starting to sweat it.

National Novel Writing Month, more commonly known as NaNoWriMo, is something I’ve been making excuses not to do for several years now. The past few years I’ve instead undertaken something called the Salon Challenge, which is explained here. NaNoWriMo, conversely, is all about quantity, not quality, so the Salon Challenge isn’t really in the same spirit, and hell, I’m unemployed and 24 in Chicago, and what else do I have to do with my time than write 50,000 words of drivel in 30 days?

Anyway, I’m going to try to do this thing right. No cheating or writing 50,000 words of TDW or anything – I’m going to write a whole first draft of a brand new novel, from conception to finish, in 30 days. By nature, this is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, stream-of-consciousness exercise, so I can’t really give you an outline of what I’m working on since I myself don’t know. I tried to start with an open-ended concept, something that I can get 175 pages worth of play out of: famous evangelical Bill Glass discovers that death is impermanent for him (though it can have some pretty weird side effects), so he forms a team of globe-hopping, high-flying, space-blasting adventurers who set out to fix all the world’s problems. Fun!

So what this means for you, dear reader, is that I can’t really predict what will happen to Awkward World during the coming month. Either I will write myself blue on the NaNoWriMo story and have no desire to even think about music reviewing, or else I’ll so desperately need a break, need to write something, anything else, and reviewing music will be my only respite. Who knows. But I’m planning for the former, which is a bummer because I just got a ton of new music for my birthday (or spent my birthday money on it), and there’s a lot I want to say. So, until (or if) I get a chance for real reviews, here are the highlights:

-Sainthood by Tegan & Sara is one of the best records this year.

-Backspacer by Pearl Jam is really good also.

-You can skip the new Swell Season and Monsters of Folk.

-The new Mike Doughty and Ben Gibbard/Jay Farrar efforts are worth hearing, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking.

-Nickie and I went to a Gaslight Anthem concert at the Double Door last week. The openers were Murder By Death and the Loved Ones, and it was awesome. Haven’t been to a real punk show in a while. And Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio was there too, just hanging out. Wow!

Okay, gotta go. Making cupcakes. See ya in a month.

PS – If you want to join me and 120,000 others in National Novel Writing Month, you can get all the info you need here. And if you want to keep up with what I’m writing, well you can see that right here.