Update on my NaNoWriMo, life & death, websites and a special thanks

I should be writing my novel right now. But I don't have a good idea to move it along right now, so I'll update the world about it.

So the working title is/was "Faith in the Age of Reason," which sounds if not high-brow, at least mainstream and decent.

But alas the perils of writing a novel in 30 days means that sometimes you have to keep writing, whether you have an idea or not. So in this novel that was supposed to be an exposition of some kind of the dichotomy of friendships between people with different views etc. has recently included dialogue about poop.

...

I know.

Anyways, I'm at 16,175 words so far, whereas I should be at 25,000 to be on pace to finish on time. As you can see we've got a long way to go.

I did want to share something with you I found amusing.

WARNING, SPOILERS BELOW (Just in case you might want to be surprised about a possible twist in the novel, stop reading here.)

If I get into the last five days and I'm completely stuck, I'm casting off the entire story to that point as the two main characters working undercover when in reality they are superhumans with powers. They will then proceed to take out terrorism with their heat ray vision, possibly with the help of some boat cops they know (You're welcome).

Why would I do that? Because the goal of NaNoWriMo isn't to produce high literature or low. It's not about getting published. It's about taking that thought of "One day I'll write a novel" and making it a reality through imperfect means. If you force yourself to have a deadline, you can succeed.

Come Dec. 1, I will be able to say (If I "win") that I have written a 50,000 word novel. Even if it blows.

For the record, I think there might be enough decent material in there to salvage into a novel of the intended purpose, but that's what December is for.

For now, it's full steam ahead.

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On a side note, I wish it didn't take tragedies or celebrations to get us to see some of our family members we don't see often. The way our culture is set up the relation of cousin gets pushed further away as we age, and I guess that's just how it is.

Nevertheless, may God accept the soul of my great uncle Carl Horst. He was well-loved by many. I wish I could have been visiting the members of the Horst family on better circumstances but it was at least good to see them. I'm praying for you guys.

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I updated my website recently, www.johnstegeman.weebly.com. It now includes in the page design section, a complete project I worked on through some pdf viewer called Issu. I'm not crazy about how it looks but it's better I guess than uploading things as jpgs. Someone please take a look and tell me what you think.


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Last, I've recently learned that this blog has more readers than I thought. Even though I used to be published in the real world, I still have a hard time believing people care this much about what I have to say, but, thanks nonetheless.

So to my regulars (Matt and Dungy), the occasional reader (Kelli, Mom, others), the "What's a blog reader," (Dad) and the apparent great silent majority of you who read this blog, thanks for stopping in.