NaNoWriMo Begins Today!

For the rest of the world that is not pestered with voices in their head and who may not know what that means. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. NaNo, as it is mostly abbreviated, requires writers to write 50,000 words of original material in the month of November. If you do - then you win. What do you win? Nothing but the ability to say that you finished a novel, which is something that most people say that want to do in their life, but let's face it, they rarely accomplish.

So, for those of you who may be thinking that "Hey, I could do that!" Well, you're right! 50K words is something like 1,667 words a day. If you can keep up that pace than you really don't have any huge worries.

Ahem, of course, you'll need to plan for the flu, several early dismissal days from school, the 4 days that your in-laws will be visiting for Turkey Day and various other distractions but otherwise it's totally doable.

But some of the best things about NaNo is that you're not doing this alone. There are several levels of community for you to be part of. There's the national level, then you can find a local group, or maybe even an online group. I went to a local kick-off a few years ago and it was amazing. Not something I need to do again by myself but there was a lot of energy there!

For me, I'm all about the online communities. I have 2 online writing communities of which I am part and we have a NaNo discussion set up already. Also, the NaNo site allows you to set up a buddy list using your NaNo username. These communities and buddies are to keep encouragment up and make sure you know that you're not alone. You might still go crazy but you won't be alone.

This announcement is also to say that posts to this blog in the month of November will either b a) sparse or b) used as a way to avoid the novel I'm supposed to be writing. It probably won't be hard to figure out how the writing is going after the first week!

Probably the most amazing part of the NaNo process is that it's a volunteer/ non-profit site. There's a fund-o-meter to let people know if they've met their expenses for the month to keep the servers up and to fund the educational projects they run. You see, it's not all about a bunch of people putting their butts in a chair and typing. It's also about teaching kids about the power of story. And truly, that may be the Coolest Idea of All!