3 Cheers for Thinking!

There's a bit of coverage for the end of November, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), most of it, oddly, is in New Hampshire, but I ran across this article in the UK (where the Brits have blown us Yanks away with word counts!!) The icWales notes:

Full-time novelists spend their working lives alone. This is a situation most people would run from.

But in such isolation, like a monk entering a trance, writers delve into a fictional world. This is an alternative reality yet the people, experiences and emotions are drawn from the author's own existence. Such an enterprise sounds dangerous. It inevitably involves a confrontation with your own history, hurts and desires.

Around 75,000 people are taking part in this exercise right now, thanks to NaNoWriMo. That means a mass of humanity - eerily identical in size to the prison population predicted by the Home Office for 2006 - will spend this month watching less television and instead indulging in introspection.

In a society where so-called search engines flash diversionary advertisements and even the wilderness bleats to the sound of ring tones, it is exciting that thousands are sitting down to think. A true natural wonder.

I thought that was a nice way to put it. Sitting down to think. Actually, since I write to music blaring, I'm usually "bouncing and dancing around" to think but it's the idea that counts, right? :)