Welcome to November and what promises to be a busy month ’round these parts. It’s the first day of a lot of things, specifically National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) and How Not To Grow A Beard Month (HoNoToGroABeMo). The first two were originally started by Chris Baty and Eden Marriott Kennedy (which may or may not be a pseudonym), respectively, while the third is a creature of my own devising. ¹How Not To Grow a Beard Month is not related in any way to Movember, a charity mustache-growing event that also happens to take place throughout the month of November. In fact, I was unaware that … Continue reading

Rather than writing separate posts about my progress in each of these endeavors, I’m going to combine them all into a single, daily post that will feature a photo of my beard growth (or lack thereof) and a bit about my trials and triumphs on the way to 50,000 words. I’m probably not going to mention NaBloPoMo again until the end of the month, as the daily posts will fulfill my requirements and I try to shy away from meta-blogging for the most part.

So, the beard is gone, shaved off for my Hallowe’en costume. I toyed with the idea of shaving my head, too, but Laura vetoed me. I was a little nervous about how Kyle would react to seeing me without the beard that I’ve been sporting since well before he was born—not to mention with my face painted in an approximation of The Red Skull—so I had him watch while I first used my beard trimmer to cut most of the facial fur off, then lathered up and shaved my chin smooth with the old Mach 3. ²I absolutely loved to watch my father shave when I was a boy, and I’m a firm believer that every boy should at least have the opportunity to watch his father do so.

My fears were unfounded; Kyle handled the entire thing—from shaving to application of the latex brow and cheekbone enhancer to painting of my face—like a champ. At no point did he ask where daddy went, and he never hesitated to jump into my arms when I was done up like a gruesome, grinning villain.

And so, with a naked chin and a glimmer of a story idea, I set forth on the journey that will be November. During my lunch break at work, I wrote just over 800 words (thank you, Google Docs), putting me just shy of the halfway point for today. Once Kyle goes to bed and the house is (relatively) quiet, I’ll see about doubling that and maybe throwing in an extra hundred words or so to start building a buffer.

In tomorrow’s update, I’ll reveal which story I’ve decided to tell this November and pull back the curtain on some of the ideas behind it.