NaNoWriMo, or National Novel-Writing Month

So November is National Novel Writing Month.
Yeah there really is such a thing. I did not make it up.

The challenge is to write a novel (defined as 50,000 words) in thirty days, starting on November 1st and ending on November 30th.

The idea of the whole thing is: Everyone works better under the pressure of a deadline.

As any student who’s ever stayed up all night to finish something that’s due at school the next day can attest!

I first heard of this NaNoWriMo thing last year from a friend who’s done it before. It sounded cool, so I thought I’d try it. I signed up and began, but I wasn’t at all sure I could complete it.

As I told my friend at the time, my biggest obstacle is that I’m an abysmal typist. Oh, and I have five kids.

Both things were definitely challenges. Because I did not take typing in high school like my mother told me to (She was right again! Grrr…) I am essentially a quickened-by-practice hunt-and-peck typist.

I high school I was more interested in saving my electives for really important classes like drama and choir. What can I say? I was a teenager!

So I don’t type all that quickly, and I make a LOT of mistakes. But that’s the beauty of the word processor, right? I don’t have to break out the correct-tape (remember THAT stuff?) in order to fix my excessive amount of typographical errors.

And as for the problem of trying to concentrate on doing something creative while five kids try to distract me… well, that’s obviously a REAL challenge!

Although I did manage to write the 50,000 words by the deadline last November, the novel wasn’t actually finished for several more months.

But I did feel like I had accomplished something.

So I’m going to try it again starting on Monday.

Anybody want to join me?

Click on the link below to read more about it:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/