SFist spent a nice day at the beach on Sunday with some friends and learned about a rather interesting project over drinks at the new Sutro's at the Cliff House (a review of which we'll have for you shortly). National Novel Writing Month involves thousands of people pounding out fifty thousand words of fiction stricitly during the month of November. While SFist thought that this was a recipe for some really terrible novels, we were still intrigued. And besides, some people spend years writing really bad novels, so who's to say a good one couldn't be written in a month? Or at least one that gets published?

The idea of Oaklander Chris Baty, it was started in 1999 with a core group of six authors who managed to make the grade. Chris now serves as the director as the project goes into its fifth straight year. He's also the author of the non-fiction guide, "No Plot? No problem!" which we thought was a Hollywood screenplay writing guide. He'll be speaking at Stacey's Books on September 29th, where he'll be talking about the project and signing copies of his book. If you'd like to get involved, there's a whole host of resources right here on the innerweb: the project homepage, local and national forums, 2003's NaNoWriMo web ring, a Tribe or the blog of Ryan Kawailani Ozawa, which hosts a great resource site. There's even a National Novel Editing Month in March. SFist is mulling the idea, and would love it if someone wanted to present their effort in serial form!