HEY, I'M A WRITER NOW — SHAZAM!

Maybe if I write this down it will seem more like an actual commitment.

Christy and I have agreed to do National Novel Writing Month together, November being the month. She has done it before and is gung-ho. I'm a novice and am skeptical. I don't know the rules. I think it's something like you start writing a shitload every day, even if you have nothing to say, and a novel magically comes into being, like a Chia Pet.

I imagine this happening in the dead of night, even though I work days now. I simply refuse to believe that any decent novels are written before midnight. So I'll certainly be too tired to get anything done at work for the next 30 days.

You are not supposed to worry if you don't have a plot. One will materialize when you aren't looking. And you are not supposed to worry about it being good because some good, if totally vague, thing will naturally come out of it. OK. Whatever. I'll trust in all that, even though it sounds suspiciously close to the argument my mom employed to get me to go to Girl Scout camp.

But I still see myself sitting down on Nov. 1 and staring helplessly at the screen. I see a lot of coffee cups and pacing and quizzical looks from my philistine dogs.

Maybe I should focus on characters. I think I could, with relative ease, just start making up a character and then branch off into that character's lover or friends or co-workers or neighbors. I mean, you start throwing a bunch of people in a room together and conflicts and sex and THEMES — and all the other building blocks of literature — naturally arise, right?

I'll probably end up with nothing more than a collection of thinly connected character sketches, but, hey, in some quarters that qualifies as a novel these days.

Anyway, I'm taking suggestions on character types to write about, so if anything springs to mind, let me know. And if you are about to suggest this — aging newspaper editor with dim future and chronic coffee breath pathetically negotiates a midlife crisis with crankiness and Tums — keep it to yourself.