---
title: "Nanowrimo Day 1"
date: 2003-11-01
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2003"
    url: "/tag/2003.md"
---

# Nanowrimo Day 1

It’s just after 7pm on Saturday 1 November and I’ve finished my first day’s writing in the [NaNoWriMo](https://web.archive.org/web/20040222033726/http://nanowrimo.org/) challenge. I managed 2,108 words today, which I’m really pleased with. It took me about 3 hours, a little over 1 hour in the morning straight writing (about 1,000 words) and in the evening I spent 1-2 hours writing interspersed with some research on the Web. I’ll post my [daily update](https://web.archive.org/web/20040222033726/http://www.readwriteweb.com/gems/nanowrimo_report_card_2003.xls) in my menu, under “Internal Links”, using [Erik Benson’s](https://web.archive.org/web/20040222033726/http://erikbenson.com/index.cgi?node=Preparing%20for%20Disaster) Excel spreadsheet. Hopefully I can keep up this pace.

What is my novel about? I’m still working on the plot, but I can say that a couple of the main themes will be **Two-Way Communication** and **SETI** (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The main character’s name is Declan Atomz and he’s a 30-year old Technical Support for a dot com software company. He’s an amateur astronomer and a lifelong “tinkerer” with electronic equipment. In my current plans, I have him undergoing a big transformation later in the novel – which has a little something to do with the SETI theme 😉

btw, one reason why I’m writing this novel is to explore themes – such as two-way communication – that seem to demand a bigger canvas than a weblog. I got the feeling during the [“broadcasting vs conversations”](https://web.archive.org/web/20040222033726/http://www.readwriteweb.com/2003/10/23.html#a135) dialogue last week that I needed a more creative way of expressing my ideas, as some people didn’t grok what I was trying to say. Perhaps this was due to the way I said it. So I’m hoping the process of writing a novel in a month will not only enable me to fully explore these *themes that want a wide canvas*, but at the end of the process I’ll hopefully be a better weblog writer for it.

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/2003/11/01.html#a140))*