The first few words of what may turn out to be a story are at Twitter. My inspiration for this came from Max Barry's latest stunts - after already publishing a story via email newsletter, he recently sat down and wrote for a live audience at a convention.

Twitter fulfills the criteria of making it all but impossible to go back to edit, and adding a bit of public pressure. Also, instant persistence. I could write from anywhere. And I need to think in sentences below 140 letters, which eliminates the Kafka syndrome.

Well. Back to actually writing, now.

Who knows?

All I know is that out of six years I have known about NaNoWriMo, I have written only in the four years where stress and insomnia have all but killed me. In the two past years, where I had mostly nothing to do, I didn't write a word.

Now that my life has picked up a bit again, I might give it another shot.

In which case this would be the shortest time before day 0 I've ever decided to do it. I haven't even got an idea yet, just a vague jumble of rambles.

What I know is that this year, I won't type-set at all, nor use backspace or even the cursor. Text will flow straight from the keyboard, via cat, to the hard drive.

We shall see.

And that is all you're going to see from me tonight.

Why?

Because I am about to sleep the sleep of the living dead. That's why.

I've been up for 28 hours in a row. My record is, I think near 34. I have no intention to break it. Attempting it would break more than the record.

So good night, hugs and congrats for everyone else who is finished, and now I'll just go and sleep.

It's going well. Currently 14783 words, probably going to reach 20000 by Wednesday. Which would, on the whole, be an excellent first week.

I can hardly believe it - I feel like I'm not even doing anything! I spent atrocious amounts of time procrastinating, and yet I'm writing like there's no tomorrow.

Last year it seemed my days had shortened to 12 hours each. This year, they have grown to 48. There is no lack of time. No lack of plot. No lack of words.

Nanowrimo-related things will be posted over at http://nanowrimo.ermarian.net/ - helps me to keep things separate, although I may occasionall post updates here as well.

And that is all, for now.

Holy mackerel. A look at the calendar tells me it is now only five weeks before we enter that infamous one twelfth of the year when I (while already not that stable in normal times) go completely bonkers. My sleep patterns will suddenly adjust to a 36-hour day (through some kind of time compression fueled by raw caffeine), I will seclude myself in my room, and when you hear an ear-splitting groan as from someone who has just reformatted his hard drive by mistake, you know that I am facing writer's block.

The worst trouble, of course, is that I have no clue yet about what to write.

At least the genre is clear. By exclusion, I can rule out the genres I can't write in, which leaves me with Fantasy - or, if I feel adventurous, Science Fiction.

But what is the plot?

Another thing that is fortunately answered is the question of how I will write it.

I've tried loads of ways. The first one was MS Word, which sucked. The second was through Blogger, which didn't suck as much. Last year I installed a MediaWiki, which turned out to be quite good with remembering my changes (and was useful after I added a wordcount hack to it). This year I briefly considered going with the drupal blog I have right here, but I dumped that again.

Writely's for me. It has the advantage of all online services that I can access it from any computer, and it offers a revision history, which otherwise only MediaWiki does. What distinguishes it from MediaWiki is the export feature and the better formatting options.

One problem I haven't yet figured out is how to check out a document locally and re-import it to Writely later. Which is vital, because half of my writing is done on train rides, without internet access. I will probably have to export it as odt and then re-import it - but I can't import it over the existing document as a new revision. Only as a new document.