So, tomorrow another sticky will be going up, but today I wanted to talk about NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know it yet, November is National Novel Writing Month, where you write a 50,000 word book in a month. What do you win if you succeed? A little graphic of a man running with a pencil. And a completed manuscript that would be laughed at if you showed it to anyone. I won’t be showing mine here, but if you visit Pike’s Revenge and get yourself friended I’d be happy to let you read my work and help me edit it later. Because the whole point of Nano is the word count.
It doesn’t matter if your book sucks (and trust me, it’s going to suck). It doesn’t matter if you type out the word MOO forty seven thousand times to reach your goal (yes, I know someone who has done this – although 47k is probably an exaggeration 😉 ), it just matters that you are writing, furiously, for 30 days. You will survive on coffee and a masochistic need to “win” for the entire month (including Thanksgiving – holidays just don’t get better than asking your husband if you can take dinner to your computer). You will become a master at writing things in the longest, most round-about way you can, and you will not use hyphens in your words for the entire month! (hyphenated words only count as one word!)
You will miss all the sales on Black Friday even though you will be up early that morning. You will instead be typing for your life because you are only at 27k and need to reach 50k by midnight on the 30th.
I’ve already scanned all of my sticky notes for the month of November to try desperately to update in the midst of all this craziness. I wish all of you participating in Nano a hearty Good Luck. As for myself – I’ve already started ingesting massive amounts of caffeine to get my body ready.