Years ago, when my family purchased one of our first computers, we finally bought one that had a dot matrix printer. I do not recall the specific make or model, but I think my brothers and I all had our first programming experiences with it. I also fondly remember how my dad would spend hours seated in front of it, typing and printing up pages. He always jokingly referred to what he was working on as his "memoirs." The home computer could turn the everyday man into someone who was self published. He never showed what he wrote to us kids, nor do I know if he shared these memoirs with my mom. I'm not even entirely certain of the content of his writings, whether or not it was fiction or drawn from his life experiences. I wonder if they still exist somewhere, in either printed pages or saved on some old disc tucked away in a drawer. It would be interesting to see what drove him to write and what about. As I sat here typing the other day, I was reminded of those memories of my father, his exercise in writing, his "memoirs" and delighted in how I'm mirroring him. I am curious about what drives people to write in general. Whether about their work or daily happenings or novels. Occasionally, I feel I have a mild form of hypergraphia myself, that over-powering desire to write. Although frequently it is accompanied with the lack of anything substantial to write about. It comes to me sporadically, not enough to participate, as a number of people I know did, in the National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. Although I enjoy the word counters they post as progress reports as the last day of writing approaches. Maybe next year, as an additional exercise in writing, I will try my hand at that seat-of-the-pants celebration of novel writing. But I can't promise anything. 50,000 words of at least marginally coherent material, in a months time, is an ambitious goal. How many friends participating this year will get close to finishing in time? I've done a lot of writing here, closing in on 500 entries over the course of a couple years, for comparative value, I wonder what my word count is up to?