(Potentially relevant link)

I'm thinking I'll probably try writing a novella this November. I'm not sure if I'll make it, but if I do, it will be the most awful thing I've ever written. I'll likely try for a fantasy novel, but I won't have a detailed world worked out, and I'll probably have to write all sorts of weird stuff in order to produce five pages each day. There will probably be weird bits where I go off into sci-fi subplots on other planets (desperate attempts to finish my daily dose), completely irrelevant and ignored in later parts. ('Meanwhile, out hero was still on his home planet and was entirely unaware and unaffected by this chain of events'.) There will be rambling, semi-coherent discussions of natural kinds and rigid designators. Characters will discuss Descartes, mathematical dorkage, and metaphoric comparisons of Java to C++. The hero will draw circuit diagrams in the dirt between battles.

Basically, what I'd post here if I were required to record my daily thoughts, rather than simply writing a post when the IC went down. Bloody thing.

I do encourage you to write a novella too. It will be terrible, but who cares? You'll probably learn a thing or two. Maybe you'll get better at dialog, at maintaining a linear path in your writing, or spelling sesquipedalians. Who knows? If nothing else, when your (future or present) children (or students) complain about the terribly long ten-page term papers they have write, you can regale them with a tale of the time you wrote a 50 000-word novella in a single month. After all, spoilt brats like us aren't going to be able to brag that we walked through twenty kilometres of snow to school each day. We need some way to shame our future lazy brats.

(Props to Graham for putting me on to this. My new favourite blog, his is.)