Yes it’s that time of year where Twitter is all aflutter with talk of moustaches and novels. The nights have finished drawing in and the drunken abandon of Hallowe’en has passed into the forgotten annals of Facebook albums to be ignored until next year.

Winter’s here and it’s a time for soup, fires, books and growing a moustache and forgetting to do it for charity (yeah, you’re supposed to get yourself sponsored, you unbearable poseur). Winter’s also a time of reflection when we look back and realise that we’ve done nothing to inspire or improve the world. You know, that feeling that everyone gets where they want to make the world a better place by forcing their insufferable platitudes upon an uninterested populace?

Well, most people.

It’s an old cliché that everyone has “one novel in them” and the NaNoWriMo scheme does its best to prove the point by having a set month for people to blurt out whatever nonsense is lolling around in their brains, having a proverbial mud-wrestle with smutty jokes and opinions on X Factor contestants. NaNoWriMo is a bit like school.

People need structure to create their best work and signing up for NaNoWriMo gives it to you, whether you like it or not. You have thirty days to write a novel. Easy as that, right? Everyone’s been planning their great page-turner since the last National Novel Writing Month ended.

Actually, no-one has.

What does signing up for the scheme get you? Well, you can meet up with like-minded people who are also trying to write the next great novel within the confines of thirty days. What qualifies these kindred spirits to do this? Why, they have laptops and Starbucks loyalty cards! You can get uppity about that if you want but their “coat of arms” leaves that heavy implication.

The National Novel Writing Month website claims that you, yes YOU, can write a novel in a month. C’mon! It’s easy! Anyone can do it! It doesn’t even have to be good! Just give us some money! What? Of course it’s for char- oh… servers are charity, right?

Look, let’s face facts. If you want to write a novel, you don’t have to sign up to do it in a month, try to cram as much into it as possible and wail about it on twitter so that people think you’re being brave. Sure anyone can write a novel and if you are writing a novel then kudos to you. Even if it never sees the light of day, at least you’ve had a bash at it. You can be proud of that.

Still though, why would anyone feel the need to register to write a book?

It could be because to write a novel, there’s no support structure. We don’t mean “people there to help”, there are plenty of industry vultures looking to do people down in the pursuit of a quick buck, we mean the social networking crutch structure. The only reason to sign up and dedicate a month of your life to writing a novel is so that everyone can give you a nice big pat on the back and say, “My word, look at how clever you’re being. I can’t wait to read it.”

Perhaps when it rolls around to the 14th November you can send them the two-page long, tear-stained manuscript that will stand forever as testament to your failure. If you even remember that you signed up by that point.

This year’s Rambo gave the world just what it needed – an unnaturally jacked-up sexagenarian doing gory murder on millions of foreigners.

And, make no mistake, Rambo worked on every conceivable level – as a flat-out action movie, as a piece of issue-based social filmmaking, as a way of utterly obliterating the Burmese tourist industry, as a warning against the use of HGH at an advanced age, as a reminder that nobody looks good with a mullet. We could go on.

But anyway, that’s why we’re thrilled at the news that Sylvester Stallone has just signed on to direct Rambo 5, due to start filming next year. What’s more, Sylvester Stallone is also thought to be writing Rambo 6. Plus Stallone wants Rambo 7 to be an animated cartoon, and Rambo 8 to be a musical, and Rambo 9 to be a stageplay and Rambo 10 to be a remake of Rambo 6 starring children and puppets and Rambo 11 to be an avant-garde Warhol-style close-up of one of his own eyelashes that lasts for 48 hours.

All true. Except for the last 57 words.

Though easy to mock at the time, when Sylvester Stallone revisited one of his most famous cinematic creations for Rocky Balboa, he crafted an elegant, eloquent finale to the series that dropped the overblown posturing of its previous sequels and let the character go with a respect and dignity that nobody really thought possible.

And, right after that, Sylvester Stallone made another Rambo movie, about an old bloke killing everything and running around going “Aaargh!” a lot. So it all balances out.

And, unquestionably, Rambo was a success. It made money. It regained Sylvester Stallone’s position as the daddy of the gormless action movie. It reminded Americans that diplomacy never works and the only to resolve international disputes is to send a mental old pensioner into the woods to tear out peoples’ throats and shred them to pieces with a minigun.

That’s why it’s nothing short of genius that Sylvester Stallone has just signed up to make Rambo 5, while simultaneously writing Rambo 6. Moviehole reports:

The aging action-hero has already written “Rambo 5” – rumoured to be shooting next year in Bulgaria, though set in the United States – and is about to put pen to paper on a sixth installment of the series. Also, the next two films won’t be War films like the original movies… but just straight-up action thrillers.

That’s awesome news – when it comes to near-silent beefcakes mumbling something vaguely philosophical before firing 600 arrows through a guerrilla’s face, nobody does it better than Sylvester Stallone. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here – we still have our reservations about Rambo 5 and Rambo 6. For instance:

*Action thrillers? That sounds terrible. Scooby Doo is an action thriller. If Rambo 5 is about Sylvester Stallone investigating a haunted funfair we’re going to be deeply pissed off.

*To make Rambo 5 better than Rambo 4, Stallone clearly needs to up the body count. We’re not sure that’s even physically possible, to be honest, unless the whole film is just a fast-forwarded domino line of shifty-looking south east Asian men getting their faces blown off one after another for a full day.

*If Rambo 5 starts filming next year, Sylvester Stallone will be 63, so he could feasibly be in his late sixties by the time Rambo 6 rolls around. Let’s hope that Sylvester Stallone has already factored that into the script and made sure that Rambo’s biggest enemies in that film are incontinence and an inability to eat soup properly.

*Remember that Sylvester Stallone needed vast quantities of Human Growth Hormone to keep him in shape for Rambo 4. We wouldn’t be surprised if, for Rambo 6, Stallone has to resort to drinking babies’ spinal fluid and injecting himself with unicorn semen.

Other than all that, though, great. We can’t wait.

Read more:

Sly Directing Rambo 5 – Moviehole