November is going to be an exciting month. I’ll be spending the first four days of the month in southern California for work. Dena and I are taking a four day jaunt to Las Vegas before Thanksgiving for a well-deserved mini-vacation. We’re going to go hiking at Red Rock Canyon and other fun stuff to be determined. Finally, at the end of the month I will spend few days in Paris, France for the Search Engine Strategies show. I’m really looking forward to the trip to Paris. I won’t get much time to do the tourist thing but I plan to see the Louve and Eiffel Tower during a caffeine-induced trek of the city at night.

Aside from travel, this is also National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been trying to do it for four years now. Each year work and life gets in the way. This year may not be an exception, unfortunately. Because of the time crunch, I’m going to focus on rewrites and exploring the current work in progress. It’s the first short story I’ve written in nearly two years. It was critiqued by my writers group at the last meeting. I’ve got a stack of notes to sort through and some pretty interesting ideas to explore. I’m going to focus on that. There are a few stories-worth of material I want to explore so I’ll take the time to do so now, instead of writing something I would likely be embarrassed by. I think, at this point in my “career” (I don’t know if you can call being an unpublished writer a career path), I would rather write 5,000 good words than 50,000 bad ones. If I end the month with one polished short story that’s ready to be sent to live in an editors slush pile, so be it.