For those of you not in the know: NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which started in 1999 (wayyy before November became 'Movember' and all those other fancy scrambled month names) and has been going strong ever since. I've participated in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and I won (meaning: I wrote a novel of at least 50,000 words) in the last three of those attempts. Since then, I've been too busy with work (ironically, I started this blog in 2012 because I thought I'd have more time for creative pursuits, but that didn't really work out...) or travels to participate, but this year I will give it another go.
As with the 52 book challenge, I'm not hitting myself over the head if things don't work out, because the truth is that I'm still swamped with a lot of other things. But if you don't try you won't ever succeed, so this morning I 'created my novel', which means I picked a genre and put in a short working title and synopsis. My past NaNo experience tells me that the actual end result will probably be something only vaguely resembling what I wrote today, but the important thing is the first step.
If you've ever thought about writing anything but find yourself having (or making up) a lot of excuses for not actually writing, NaNoWriMo is for you. You have to write a lot, while turning your Inner Editor off: it's about quantity, not quality. December is the time for editing and fine tuning, November is the time for output.
Also, there's a really nice community of people all working towards the same goal, with online forums and real life meet-ups (Write-ins). So even if you don't end up with a novel, you may end up with new friends.
You can find my author's page here, but I'll keep you updated on my progress and word count as November comes around. And who knows; I may even post some excerpts!
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