I understand that I am a talented person, capable of heroic acts of creativity, and I will give myself enough time over the course of the next month to allow my innate gifts to come to the surface unmolested by self-doubt, self-criticism, and other acts of self-bullying.

During the month ahead, I realize I will produce crappy dialogue, cliched characters, and deeply flawed plots.  I agree that all of these things will be left in my rough draft, to be corrected and/or excised at a later point.

I understand my right to withhold my manuscript from all readers until I deem it complete.  I also acknowledge my right as author to substantially inflate both the quality of the rough draft and the rigors of the writing process should such inflation prove useful in garnering me respect, attention, or freedom from participation in household chores.

I acknowledge that the month-long 50,000-word deadline I set for myself is absolute and unchangeable, and that any failure to meet the deadline, or any effort on my part to move the deadline once the adventure has begun, will invite well-deserved mockery from friends, family and especially co-workers.

I also acknowledge that, upon successful completion of the stated noveling objective, I am entitled to a period of gleeful celebration and revelry, the duration and intensity of which may preclude me from participating in responsible adult activities for days, if not weeks, afterward.

For those interested in keeping tabs on my progress throughout the month and giving me ample amounts of “encouragement” should I fall behind feel free to check the link below.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/523029

Frank J. Gilroy, 10/31/2009

Novel Start Date: 11/01/2009

Novel Deadline: 11/30/2009

Below is an excerpt from a writing assignment I gave myself leading up to National Novel Writing Month.  Your feedback is welcome in the comments.

His body had a sort of internal system of triggers built in to let him know when he was out of shape.  His back would start hurting, he’d have trouble sleeping and he’d notice problems in what were usually normal trips to the bathroom. To the untrained eye John looked in good shape, skinny even, and he mostly was.  The problem was that he hid his weight well.

He had a very thin frame for a man and when he grew a gut it wreaked havoc on his body.  It was as if his skeleton couldn’t take the pressure of the extra load.  He woke up that cool fall morning to another severe back ache.  He propped himself up, ignoring his fears of leaving a grease spot on the peach painted wall behind his sweaty head.  On top of everything, he’d had a pretty rough dream.

“Your brain is your soul”.

Those were the words pinging around in his head.  The trick he’d normally use to help him clear his mind and get back to sleep weren’t working.  He got up trying carefully not to wake Leslie and headed for his usual perch in the living room.

He tried to recall more of the dream.  The only thing he could remember was that he had been dreaming about Andi.  Andi was a science fiction character he’d been working on for his next novel.  He could only imagine at this point, what the phrase meant.

“Your brain is your soul”.

Much of Andi’s current struggle dealt with teleportation.  In his book, John had developed a very detailed plan for how he felt teleportation would really be possible in the future.  The philosophical dilemma Andi’s generation would have to deal with was the morality of discarding the original body after it had been recreated at it’s destination.

The idea was that it would become easy to transmit the entire contents of the human brain over a high speed network along with enough DNA data to clone a new shell.  Once your brain data met up with your new body you’d be brought back to life and could go about your business.

The problem was in deciding what to do with your “evil” twin.  Since it became clear that you were “in tact” in mind and body at your new destination and there were no signs of a missing soul, one had to conclude there was really no such thing as a soul or that it was simply contained within the confines of your mind.

If that were true and your copy was the same as you in every way, were you really dying if your original host was destroyed?  Why was it that this notion woke John up?  Why would he later call it a nightmare when describing it to family.

John was a pretty liberal, open minded guy.  He would have expected such a question to make for interesting philosophical debate had it come up in casual conversation while awake.  What would his wife think about it when he explained it to her?  Would she think he had lost his mind?  Would she recant the words he’d heard from her with greater frequency as of late?

“We gotta start getting back to church!”

How would he explain to her that he feels he’d once and for all lost his faith in traditional religion. Writing had become his religion now.  It was his confessional, his means of fellowship and had apparently become his route to eternal life.

The more John thought about religion and the promise of eternal life in heaven if you’re “good”, the more he was conflicted.  On one hand he understood the need for such faith among many.  But mostly he looked upon it with what he thought was healthy skepticism.  Anyone who’d act as if they “knew” what was going to happen to him after he died was tagged with a certain disdain in his mind.

Was it so wrong to want to live forever here on this plane of existence?  Didn’t it say something of his character if he was willing to put up with other people’s bullshit for eternity?

It occurred to me today that part of the reason I’m not coming up with those ideas is that I’m getting to be an old fart in many respects.  I have the drive and passion to build something but just don’t have the ideas.

I got to wondering whether it might be possible for me to create a sort of teen focus group.  The idea would be that, if nothing else, I could create a group on Facebook or something of that nature and have a group of teens I could bounce website ideas off of.

That way the next time I get some hairbrained idea like realtextbreakups.com, I can sort of “vet” it there first, see if it takes off with that set of kids, before I put too much time into it.

The question of course would be, what incentive would the teens have to visit my site and give me feedback.  That of course is the hard part.

I’m thinking one way would be to offer myself up as as sort of “Jack Ass” stunt participant in exchange for the teens services.  In other words I’d allow the focus group to vote on a stunt they want me to pull should the idea we collectively launch get’s to some predetermined level of success, say a Million page views.

What say you?  Just another one of Frank’s crazy ideas?

Hey folks!  Been awhile since I wrote anything on this personal blog so I thought I’d update everyone on what’s been taking up my “extra” time lately.

As many of you know I like to play around with creating new websites and dabbling in Internet Marketing.  My problem over the years has been lack of focus, on a specific site, long enough to make it profitable.

Well I think I’ve solved that problem.  Me and some friends have launched a new NASCAR blog called “Staggered Special”.  It’s a place where we update folks on news and events in NASCAR racing but we’ve tried to put our own spin on it.

The site will update folks on the usual news of interest to the average NASCAR fan but it also tries to concentrate more on some of the up and coming drivers that don’t get much coverage.  Everyone is blogging about Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart.  But we’d thought we’d concentrate on some young guys like Justin Allgaier, Brad Coleman and Jeff Earnhardt.

The one thing I was lacking in the past, in terms of focus, was having a group of people that I could work on the blog with.  I’ve assembled a small team of four people that are actively posting and updating the site.  The group is comprised of some of my old military and high school buddies.

Wish us luck on this effort and if you have a minute come and check out the site. Me and one of my buddies are sharing one of the accounts that you’ll see posting under a “pen name’.  Can you tell which one is me?

Thanks!

I thought I’d take a moment and update those interested on what I’ve achieved thus far, what this campaign has looked like from an Internet Marketing perspective and where I plan to go from here.

Just so you’re aware of what I’ve done.  Yesterday after writing the a fore mentioned article on my Multiple Sclerosis fund raising efforts I sent out a message on Twitter to everyone following me.  My hope was that people would see the article and either donate or re-send (retweet) the article to their followers.

As of right now I’ve received 305 clicks or page views on the original article, 29 clicks on the donation link in that article and 10 donations for a total of $200, not including my personal $5 donation to test the system.

I was very excited by these results.  As I alluded to in my previous article, I was expecting a click-thru rate of around 10% on the donation link.  That is almost exactly what i got.  I was also expecting around a 10% conversion rate or rate of actual donations.  I was pleasantly surprised by what is currently a roughly 33% conversion rate.

Out of the 10 donations I received, almost all were from people I know, work with or have at least communicated with on Twitter.

My original goal was to raise $300 in roughly 120 days. Now that I’ve successfully raised 66% of my original goal in about 20 hours, I’ve decided that I should up the ante a bit.

I’m setting my new goal at $3,300.

As I mentioned yesterday, a big part of the reason I’m doing this, other than the satisfaction of helping people with MS, is to prove to myself that I can succeed in Internet Marketing and to get myself more experience.  Granted some might argue that fund raising is quite a bit different than selling a product but I decided this was a good start.

Given the fact that I’ve only done a small amount of marketing via Twitter and haven’t utilized any other media or tools of the trade I’ve decided I can achieve a great deal more with this.

This new goal might seem a little crazy so here is how I came up with this new number.

Given the fact that I haven’t achieved nearly the number of page views of some of my most popular articles I thought I’d set a page view goal at a much higher number.  So I’m going to attempt at getting my original article roughly 60,000 page views.  My most popular article achieved that on it’s own merits over a couple of days.

Based on that I’m still hoping for click-thru and page view rates of roughly 10% each for a total of 600 donations.  If each of those donations is at the original minimum amount of $5 I should be able to exceed $3000.

I’ll wrap up this post for now.  I have more thoughts on how I will get my original article it’s 60,000 page views but I think that warrants a post all to itself.

I am also on a personal mission to gain more experience in Internet Marketing and quite possibly find my dream job.

I decided that it might be interesting to try and combine these two challenges into one.

It occurred to me that if I can’t figure out a way to raise $300.00 $3,300 online by the October deadline that I will probably have a really hard time convincing others that I can increase their sales over the Internet.

I know times are tough but $300 $3,300 seems like a small amount of money for me to raise in 4 months.

So starting today I’m going to use some of what I’ve learned thus far to raise as much as I can through online sources, starting with this plea.

Would you donate $5 to my personal MS donation site?

In addition to raising money to help in the research and development necessary to find a cure for this terribly dehabilitating disease, I’d like to prove to myself that I have a chance at acheiving my dreams and that I can reach a wide enough audience.

This is why I am only asking for the site’s minimum of $5 dollars from you.

Let me know if you have any questions or have any suggestions for how I can increase the number of people who read this post.

By my best guess, based on personal rules of thumb, I need to get about 6000 60,000 people to view this page. Thank you for your help.

Please click the “Share” button below to post this article to your favorite site.

Update: I have up’d the ante and increased my goal to $3,300.