Adventures in NaNoland.

Let me start out by saying, holy crap, I've missed you guys.

And now for my excuse:

Ever heard of NaNoWriMo?


Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, you can pretty easily get ahead during the beginning and be all fine and dandy when you only have to write under 1K words a day, but that only ever lasts so long. It's a challenge. It's supposed to be, but still. It really is harder than you think it will be, and it's easier too.

It's harder because you'll get worried. You'll be gone all day and you'll think, "It's so late. I'm going to get home and I'm not going to be able to write enough words before the time changes over to the next day and I'm going to fail today and I will fail this entire thing." You'll stay up late and you'll deprive yourself of sleep, but who ever needed sleep anyway, eh? Even worse, midnight will come around and the time will change and you'll find yourself faced with tomorrow/today's goal, as well as the one you were trying to hurriedly get. So you'll write 3K words in one night, because you're crazy and you're a novelist and, wow, those are kind of the same thing, aren't they?

It's easier because 50K is a big number. You think, "there's no way I can do fifty-thousand words in thirty days. That's crazy. It's insane. Impossible." You'll say, "There's no way that I can just write 1,667 words a day and still get to 50k. That's not enough." You'll look at your graph and you'll panic just a little, because it doesn't look like it could ever get there in under 31 days. But it's not and you can and it will. No matter how many times you tell yourself that it's impossible.

NaNoWriMo kind of takes over your life. You'll look at other things and you'll feel like they're not worth your time, because holy crap, you're supposed to be writing a novel right now. RIGHT NOW. What are you waiting for, you idiot?! Go write!

And also you will probably go crazy. Your desk will match your mind, meaning, it will probably become cluttered with pens and post-it notes, scrawled out ideas. You'll eat so many things that are so bad for you. You'll learn to down a Red Bull in two minutes. You'll hate Thanksgiving because you have to spend a day (or, in my case, two or three.) cooking and cleaning and, well, doing everything but writing.

But here's to you, NaNoWriMo participants! It's almost over. I wish you the best of luck in the rest of your novel-writing frenzy. Even if you're behind. Even if you're way, way behind. Heck, add five more ways and I'm still believing in you. You can do it.

Prove me right.