NaNoWriMo

It is time to dust off that novel in the bottom drawer. NaNoWriMo is back again.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's not sponsored by any corporation or some sort of government organization- it's just something somebody thought they would try and spread about by word of mouth, and has managed to survive for the past 5 years. The goal is to start writing a novel November 1 and finish 50,000 words by midnight November 30. I did a count of all the posts I made to all newsgroups on which I was active for a couple of days and added in all of my email- I could create the word count quite easily. It's only 1667 words a day.

But I've tried it for the past two years. My first year I hit 30,000. On December 1, I realized what I had written was total crap and I pitched it. My second year, I hit 18,000, which was worse, but the quality of writing was better. That's the novel I still have sitting in my bottom drawer. This year, who knows. I'm not very optimistic about my prospects- this year I'm actually employed for one thing.

But I love the whole idea. It's a yearly nag in my brain to actively spend time doing something I love to do- namely spend time writing. I wish everyone had some thing that came along every year and reminded them to go spend some time doing something for themselves to help increase their happiness.

But I wish sometimes it was a longer month. About as often as I'm glad that NaNoWriMo isn't in February.

(used lines instead of words- I have to count lines for my job, and for the novel, it's only words, which is much less)