Firefighting and novel-writing

[squirmelia]

Today involved pretending to be a firefighter. Fires were lit in bins outside the building and colleagues were given fire extinguishers to put them out. No fires were left for me to extinguish, so I had to extinguish an imaginary fire with a CO2 extinguisher.

NaNoWriMo starts on Monday and I am excited, despite lack of plot, ideas, the usual things you might need to start a novel. I am hoping it will let me spend a month immersed in a dream land, imagining other places, other people, other happenings. There will also be a reality with other people also frantically imagining such things, and I like that bit too.

Comments

[shermarama]

I'm kind of contemplating giving NaNoWriMo a go this time, and I imagine it must be hard not to let the sense of all those other people doing the same thing creep into the story.

[laurenthemself]

Join us! It's fun and you get a novel!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

You should give it a go! Or if not, give me your ideas so I can steal them.

This is my 8th NaNoWriMo (first was in 2002, but I skipped 2007) - 4 times I reached 50,000 words and 3 times I didn't.

[findalexh.livejournal.com]

Well that's disappointing.

Set fire to the building instead, if you can't put it out with a CO2 they'll have to do a real fire drill - Everyone wins!

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

That's a really good idea. i had manditory fire training a while ago, boring lecture hall with a multiple choice quiz at the end. Means nothing. Sample fire, use a fire extinguisher: that would be memorable and helpful.

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

Sounds sensible, but we'd need a study to find out if you're right in terms of making people more effective. The sample fire might just give false confidence leading to an increase in people injured (or more rarely, killed) fighting a fire they should have left to professionals.

Then we'd need to do an analysis of cost-effectiveness. Maybe "live" training cost twice as much, but makes only a marginal difference in property loss (extinguishing the fire earlier) and no difference in lives saved. In that case, why bother?

[ixamxfe-y.livejournal.com]

You're doing NaNo? How exciting! I've planned my novel all the out to the end (it's just finishing the novel I started last year, so it wasn't terribly much) but I feel like I won't adhere to it all that much...Good luck!