Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

As I write this, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is kicking off as the world turns under the midnight line. It will be November first here in Colorado by the time this gets posted. NaNoWriMo’s web site will do a better job of explaining it than I want to take the space here to, but essentially it’s the opportunity to get together virtually, and in many cases in real life, to try and crank out fifty thousand words of fiction in a month. There’s a lot of cameraderie and you can learn a lot just from the effort. Nobody expects the result to be of finished quality, that’s what editing and revision and rewrites are for, and they come later.

I’m taking the opportunity to get a big chunk, at least, of my Apollo 18 (working title) done. It’s a technothriller about a secret mission to the Moon shortly after Apollo 17, to investigate a secret Soviet landing (the N-1 explosion was faked), in parallel with Project Jennifer (the attempt to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine). Yes, figuring out how to stack and launch a Saturn V in secret a bit of a trick.

I see from the clock in the corner of my screen that it’s just ticked over to 00:00. Time to post this and fire up the word processor. If anyone’s interested I may post snippets as I go. We’ll see.