On this date every year since high school, just after midnight, I would open up a new Microsoft Word document and immediately save it as NaNoWriMo 20xx. What is nanowrimo? National Novel Writing Month, where crazy, insane, and insane, but crazy (self included) attempt (and oftentimes fail but also succeed) in writing 50,000+ words during the month of November.
Yeah, that’s a lot of words. It’s something where you want to pace yourself about 1,667 words a day, except from my personal experience, I usually ended up writing about 25,000-35,000 words during the long Thanksgiving weekend anyway. I started doing this challenge in 2005 and even in the two years I didn’t finish, I had managed somewhere between 10,000-25,000 words. There is no prize (except for a cute banner and pdf certificate), and there is no penalty. But there is the brilliant satisfaction of knowing that you wrote a novel-length document. Is it award winning material? No, and I freely admit everything I wrote was crap and will never see the light of day. In this endeavor, it’s quantity over quality, there’s no time to edit when you need to push out 1,000 words, 500 words, 100 words, those last 10 words before you are done for the day.
This is going to be the first year where I’ve elected to not undertake the challenge. Theoretically, I could if I wanted to push myself, but with the other things I have in addition to school, it wasn’t going to happen. Maybe in a few years 🙂
So thank you, Nano for all the good times and the one proof copy that I was brave enough to print! And yes, it really is mine, ISBN/bar code and all!
(But no, it’s not for sale anywhere so don’t try looking ;))
Prelude to a Disaster
