It’s day one of National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a tradition I’ve kept up with (to varying degrees of success) since I was in high school. They have a whole community online with local chapters you can meet up with and a 501(c)(3) set up. To be honest, I’ve never given money to them. I’m not opposed to giving money to them on any sort of principled grounds or anything, I’ve just never done it. You don’t need to join the group to keep up the tradition.

Basically it’s just a challenge: write 50,000 words a day for the month of November. I don’t know what it is about November that makes people want to challenge themselves, but it sure is a great time to start a project. In the United States, by November 1st, you’ve found yourself in the mysterious time of America’s liturgical calendar called “The Holidays.” For the often under valued in-person customer service class, this time means more work. To be clear, it means more work per shift, but it also means more hours and more money. You get a huge deficit of time but you do get a nice little cash infusion. Of course, The Holidays immediately try to swallow it up. Still, if you’re keen on starting something and are in a position to prioritize it, this is generally a great time to start. No matter the scale of an effort, it’s likely some capital needs to be deployed. With a goal in mind even an extra shift can leave the profane world of capitalistic necessity and transcend into the noble plane of self-actualization.

For the generally overvalued corporate class, November 1st is a great time for one of two reasons. The best reason would be if you got laid off. There’s all sorts of reasons proffered for why layoffs happen during The Holidays. I think the best simplest explanation is that corporations (as autonomous entities–no I will not elaborate) need to tighten things up before Q1 to survive. Anyway it doesn’t matter; you got laid off either way. Yeah, you gotta apply for jobs, and maybe money’s a little tight (or you might be destitute lmao), but generally you have a lot more free time. The bureaucrat’s brain fog (BBF) is lifting and you can lucidly create and execute a plan. In real liturgical calendars (yes, I know November 1st is in Ordinary Time. No I didn’t go to Mass today. Yes I’m heartily sorry I have offended the Lord) the holidays would be a time for blessings. The corporation may have spurned you but through that God may have blessed you (and your project).

The second reason would be a quirk of The Holidays themselves. Within this quirk, you have two options. The first is to work through The Holidays (WT²H). This is especially attractive if you belong to the hikikomori corporate class, though it still works out well for the unfortunate commuters. If you WT²H, you will notice that things really start to slow down for you at work. There’s a lot of theories for why productivity goes down so much during The Holidays, and no doubt some percentage of it comes down to bad-faith actors (based) and laziness, but I think it’s simply because so many people take PTO around this time. People take PTO because they are going for the second option: stretch your paid-time off out by stacking it with weekends and holidays. It’s a classic strategy. So you have this system where some portion of the people literally just take a lot of time off–more time than they could “afford” without the buffers of the actual Holy Days–and the other portion is trying to keep the lights on.

So the procurement is on hold because Jan is out for two weeks, and Bob doesn’t come back for another three days so I have to sit on this report until he can sign it. You have more downtime when you WT²H and if you go the PTO route you have even more. If you’re in the corporate capo class (affectionately) you might even have a bonus coming in, and then you have the golden confluence of more time and more money to devote to your project.

Anyway NaNoWriMo is a pretty cool concept and my participation in it has taught me a lot of things about how to run a project. This year I’m not really doing it, but what I am doing is so completely and utterly inspired by at so as to almost be a direct rip-off of it that I would be ashamed to begin without paying some sort of homage.

This year I am using the month of November as the accelerant for my latest project: Zy Mazza. Zy is a grotesque narcissistic example of alienation of the self under capitalism, but it is also an exercise in reclamation of the digital self and a rejection of the deconstruction of the self under post-modern transhumanism. At the time of this post the home page features a photo of Lain.

In part, she is another inspiration for this effort. The illusion of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity that the internet provides is the catalyst for the rapid deterioration of the self in online interactions. We find ourselves saying things, promoting things, buying things, and generally acting in all sorts of ways we would never act in the physical world. I avoid the term “in Real Life” (IRL) intentionally here. The virtual world is very much “real.” Like the spiritual realm, it exists in a plane apart from our physical existence, but it exists nonetheless and it has a profound impact on our physical lives. Lain goes completely batshit, unable to reconcile her ever drifting personage on the Wired with her physical being, and she finds herself in a complex physical web of her digital self’s making.

I seek to avoid Lain’s fate. I am putting intentionality into the bifurcation of my physical and digital selves. Zy will no longer be a manifestation of the interactions between my physical being and digital daemons (algorithms). Like something akin to meditation, my physical self will now navigate the internet through an immortal avatar of my own making. I will descend from the physical realm into the virtual realm, in a pale imitation of God’s own journey from the spiritual realm to our profane corporal world. Unlike the person of Christ, who is fully God and fully man, Zy will exist as a totally digital being, while containing but a curated fraction of my total authentic self. Reader, this is a sort of antiapotheosis you have already done and continue to do daily simply by being online. I guess I’m just being extra about it.

Make no mistake, this digital realm, even if it is of a demonic origin, is part of God’s salvific plan for humanity. This is another lesson Lain taught me. Of course, in her world, the spiritual world and virtual world were the same place. I have heard arguments about this, but I am unconvinced. There exist three planes: the physical, the spiritual, and the virtual (all media is virtual btw, even books–no I will not elaborate).

And so I am starting. My website is a piece of shit placeholder, none of the projects I want to use Zy to promote are ready (Roko’s Library, Holy War TCG, various isekai light novels), and I don’t have any of the equipment or software I need to digitally embody myself. As you can see, my vision for this project is by no means clear, but action begets clarity. Because I also want Zy to be an intentional agent of change, I want to encourage you to start too. If you have blood in your heart you have a dream there too. Dreams are much better in the sacred realm of the Mind before they are profaned by the dirty stain of reality, and the pain of dashed hope that ensues. But! The ontological end of a dream is to be realized. An unfulfilled dream will always exist in the Mind, but a fulfilled one exists perfectly balanced between the Mind and reality. It is a more full existence, so it is a better one.

If you were looking for a sign to start, please do me the supreme honor of making this that sign, and catalyzing a noble act of creation. It’s November, a great time. Just start.