November is usually considered National Novel Writing month, when writers the world over (or maybe just the United States over) attempt a very terrible plan: Write a novel! In a month!

As any literary agent worth her or his salt will tell you, the very last thing the publishing industry needs is MORE terribly written manuscrips farted out in a few weeks. I myself slaved over my novel for five years and wouldn't wish that kind of suffering on anybody. So there's an alternative. It's called Digital Writing Month.

The difference between Nanowrimo and Digiwrimo is that Digiwrimo is more about writers using digital mediums to connect and share their work than it is about writing a novel by any means necessary. Here's the website. It encourages writers to work collaboratively, dilligently, and most of all publicly, to just basically flood the Internet with words, words, words.

To that, I say: HA! Writers, working together? If I've learned anything from the publishing industry, it's that writers are little more than uncivilized but well-spoken barbarians constantly bashing their laptops and typewriters over each other's heads screaming about query letters.

So of course I'm going to give this Digiwrimo a try.

One of my best pals, Valerie Robin, who I've only mentioned once by name and several times since then, is collaborating with me about a scifi short story... thing, that neither of us know much about yet. And it's for this Digital Writing Month.

I've even given her access to my blog for this very reason! I'm sure I've missed a few things (especially all the details), so I'll let her take it from here with the next post.

She just might try to use gangster rap on you, and if she does, I urge you to remember that she's a small 115 pound bespectacled nerd-girl.

She's got pretty sweet tattoos, though.