National Novel Writing Month Is Coming Up Fast

Holy cow, it's nearly the end of September, and you know what that means - October.  And once October is over, then that means it's November.  (Duh.)  And you know what that means...

NaNoWriMo!

If you have somehow been living under a rock... oh, no condemnation here!  I barely know the roster of the  Virginia Tech football team, which amazes my husband and children; they think I live under that rock... here's the scoop, straight from the NaNoWriMo website:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.

Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

Now... what am I gonna do this year? Write that romance story that's been in my head for, oh, 13 years? Sounds like a plan. I didn't finish last year. I got to 45K words and just had to stop and Deal With Life. It's terribly sad for my poor characters; Sarah and Marissa and Tony and Colin and William all languish somewhere on a floppy disc. Which is bad, because I now have a new computer that has no floppy drive. And I never finished the thing because I lost my momentum, trying to keep a house clean and people fed and the like. How on earth do they expect a mother to take the time to do this sort of thing?

I hereby direct myself to cease and desist the whining.  If I'm going to do it, I'm just going to have to do it.  I mean, the world will be just fine without the story of Deena and Troy, but if I write them down, maybe they'll get out of my head and leave me alone... 

To visit the NaNoWriMo home page:  http://www.nanowrimo.org/   (If you set up your own account, you can look me up - I'm Mals86.) 

Top image is keyboard- blur by striatic at flickr.   NaNoWriMo web badge is available to participants and kindly provided by nanowrimo.org.