November is National Novel Writing Month. Some people know it as NaNoWriMo. The idea is that you write 50,000 words, the accepted length of a novel, in one month. It isn’t meant to be a month to write a best seller. It’s just meant to be a time for writer-wannabes to get down and dirty, write every day, no matter what and get a novel finished. Many people actually make the goal and finish the 50,000 words by month’s end. Many more do not make it.

I have decided to go ahead and give it a go.

I don’t know if I will make the 50,000 word mark by month’s end. But I’m gonna try. The thing is, you have to start from scratch. You can’t start your novel the month before, the week before or the day before. You start November 1st at 12 A.M. Participants can go online, signup, create a profile that has a stat counter of the words you’ve finished, talk to other writers and get encouragement. It’s free to sign up.

They also have a night-of-writing party in San Francisco on November 20th. I didn’t know about that till recently, so I won’t be attending. But it looked like a pretty good shin-dig. Perhaps if I decide to do this another year, I will be able to attend the party. For now, I’m just happy to be a part of it.

I already have a plot.

We can take notes, write outlines, character sketches and so forth. We just can’t start writing the book till November 1. So I came up with a plot, and I’m not even bothering to take notes or anything because I have a feeling it wouldn’t help me in this kind of writing. Pretty much, I’m just going to hope the writing muse sets in. My story is about a crazy lady. Haha! And no, it’s not about me. That’s all I’m going to tell you. I will be including excerpts from that novel in here. Remember, if you are writing that fast, a lot of its likely to be crap. So I’m hoping I will have bits and pieces to share with you. Since I’m going to be writing probably 2-3 hours a day (1,667 words per day, about 3.5 single spaced pages), I probably won’t be real productive in this blog. So maybe the only thing I will have time to share IS my experiences with NaNoWriMo. Hope you don’t mind.

I would be interested if anyone else is planning on doing this, or if I got you interested in doing it. What the heck, huh? We only live once. Go to www.nanowrimo.org to find out more and let me know if you decide to do it. I figure, it’s marathon writing. And I’m into physical marathons. Why not a writing marathon?