I ascended the mountain of microchips and ancient cases (branded Gateway, Tandy, IBM) to reach the great guru. He sat cross-legged inside a sacred circle of flat-screen monitors. A few were blank. Some showed message boards. Others, LOLcats.

The guru opened his eyes and looked down at me from atop his holy black t-shirt.

“What is it you seek?” he asked.

“It’s this game,” I said. “Bioshock 2 — it’s crashing my computer when I try to play it. I get like, ten minutes in, and then — boom! — it takes the whole computer down. I think it’s got something to do with Games for Windows Live.”

The guru blinked slowly. “When the time of crashing comes, are your eyes filled with screen of blue death?”

“Nope. Nothing. No error messages, no blue screen, nothing. It just shuts the computer all the way down.”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean, ‘ah’? Can you help me?”

“Perhaps. But one cannot address a hardware problem if one believes it is a software problem.”

“What hardware?” I asked. “It’s within the system specs listed on the game.”

The guru shrugged slightly, as if to say that system specs are mere bullet points, designed by marketers and not engineers.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But the eye that is blinded with sweat cannot see.”

“Okay. Sure. No. Wait. What are you saying?”

“When the man is hot, he sweats, and that sweat blinds the eye.”

“Sorry, still not following.”

“Especially if that eye is inside a really hot computer case and covered with dust.”

“Oh…” I said. “You mean the graphics card, don’t you?”

“Words have many meanings,” said the guru, but I knew I was right. And he was right too. The graphics card was probably overheating — and shutting down the computer — and needed a good cleaning.

“Awesome,” I said. “Thanks!” I turned to go.

“One more thing,” said the guru. “You are right to beware the foul beast that lurks at the heart of this game.”

“Ken Levine?”

“Games for Windows Live. For truly, it is the devil.”

Thanks for the help, Colby!

I’m a fan of National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo aka Nano.

Now, I’ve heard it said that for real writers, every month is novel-writing month. And I suppose that’s true. But the same way that you love your spouse all year, but truly celebrate that love on February 14, I believe there’s benefit — even for “real” writers — to take November and focus on that novel.

Not that I’m a real writer. I’ve got a day job that I love (in game design, which includes a lot of writing), and I’ve no illusions or aspirations of leaving it for a full-time career as a pantsless, hoagie-scarfing novelist. As much as I love to write, I don’t take it so seriously that I won’t take a month to throw myself over the cliff of novel-writing because I’m too busy doing “real” writing. Even if the resulting manuscript is an unsellable jumble of cliches and bad metaphors, it’s still practice for the next one, which will inevitably be better.

Do I have a plan? Yes. Will I belabor each point in a bulleted list? Yes.

• 70K is better than 50K. As others have pointed out, the 50,000 words required to “win” Nano aren’t really enough to construct a novel that publishers or agents are willing to look at. They need at least 60, 70, or 80 thousand words for even a short novel. So I’m going for 70K this year. In a month? Well, six weeks. The plan is to hit 50K in the allotted time, then just keep going for another two weeks.
• I’m all about the outline. Okay, I’m not sure exactly how I’ll go about outlining this year’s novel, but I know it’s something I need to do by the end of next week. In the past, I’ve used notecarding, which works well for novels with multiple characters and multiple plot threads — which won’t work as well with this year’s novel. But I will start with the characters (yes, that means writing up little bio sheets for each of them) and go from there. Once I’ve got the main characters’ goals and motivations figured out, the conflict should be pretty easy to spot. Conflict leads to drama, drama leads to plot, plot leads to fear, fear leads to anger, and anger leads to the dark side. And then cookies. Yum!
• We have the tools. I have two secret weapons in my war against word count. The first, which I’ve mentioned before, is Write or Die, a fabulous website (and downloadable app) that literally forces you to keep writing. Nothing shuts up the internal editor like the threat of a blaring siren that kicks in when you stop typing. My other weapon is Google Docs. Because it’s web-based, I can work on the novel anywhere with an internet connection. Yes, you can back it up to your hard drive, and yes, I do so every day.

How about you, dear reader? Are you writing a novel in November? What’s your plan, what are your tools? Looking for a writing buddy?

I finally bought Minecraft over the weekend.

And now it’s Wednesday.

But I’ve come to Wednesday bearing offerings of contrition: a new entry in the Worth a Thousand series, a bit of more-or-less fantasy adventure called Sight Unseen, featuring the artwork of Mu Young Kim. It’s about a blind wizard who only knows fire-based spells who falls in love with a woman made of wood. (Okay, not really, though that could be an amusing story to write.)

I think this is the last Worth a Thousand I’ll be writing for a while. November is right around the corner, which brings with it my annual attempt to write a salable novel via National Novel Writing Month, so I need to spend my daily writing time preparing and outlining for that project. (More on that as November looms closer.) I enjoy the Worth a Thousand stories, and will definitely come back to them, but need to take a break to focus on some longer-length material.