Often it’s the insensitive oafs who just take something and start plodding forward, unaware of all the things that could go wrong.
—David Allen, Getting Things Done

Starting June 1, I will write a novel a month for a year and blog about the experience, with able assistance from illustrator and animator Mozhi.

I will start with a plot suggested by my three-year-old daughter, who told me a story one evening about a family of mechanically-inclined trolls who travel to our house each night in cars and buses, break in using wrenches, ladders and WD-40, and subject us to a series of complicated practical jokes.

The second plot is based upon a dream in which my long-estranged great uncle demands to meet me at a Pismo Beach-themed restaurant and hands over a fifty-year-old postcard in which the anonymous sender promises to kill him in exactly fifty years. This is the first I have heard of it. He seems to think I will be able to help.

In the third plot, the entire U.S. intelligence establishment is outsourced to a reality show.

My hope is that I may have absorbed some useful habits of mind from National Novel Writing Month, Getting Things Done, Agile software development and Harold Lloyd films. Failing that, I may have to fall back on my rich store of oafish insensitivity.