NaNoWriMo

No, that's not gibberish you see up there... that's the National Novel Writing Month abbreviation. This morning, my wonderful father sent me a link to the NaNoWriMo page, and I was instantly intrigued. I've always always wanted to write a book, and here's the excuse I need to give it a go. You "win" by successfully writing 50,000 words during the month of November. That's about 1,666.6666666666667 words per day, which is a lot. To the left of the blog posts, you will see my NaNoWriMo widget, which gives you an updated word count for my book (ha, that sounds weird). Actually, it isn't working right now because of incredible amounts of traffic at the NaNoWriMo site (how many times can I say that? Many...) Problem is, what the heck am I going to write about? I just heard about this today, so I have zero time for planning and (literally) plotting. It doesn't actually matter, because the whole point of this thing is to poop out those 50,000 words... there shall be no editing for the whole month. Then, after-the-fact, these insane "novelists" can decide if they want to pursue editing and/or publishing or if they want to abandon their work. I will probably end up with 50,000 words that have little to do with each other, but I guess we'll see!

So, today is November 1 (Happy Birthday Mom!), DAY ONE. My blog posts for this month will most likely revolve around this crazy undertaking, and may even contain excerpts. I may get little-to-no sleep, and I may have a complete nervous breakdown. I may not succeed. But hey, I bet I learn a helluva lot about myself and about my writing. 50,000 words is so very many words. I'm used to writing short blog posts, poems, songs, or short articles, so this is like my Marathon. With zero training.

Wish me luck, keep me posted if you're participating too, and check out what it's all about here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/.