UPDATE:  Sadly I'm not going to be a 'winner' for 2013 NaNoWriMo...  I got up to about 30,000 words and the story sort of ran out of steam.  That, coupled with a work trip that involved late nights and early mornings meant that I was going to be pushing it anyway.  In the end I just decided to call it and do a better job of getting ready for next year.  Alas...

 

So.  I might have mentioned that we have Movember going on and I'm participating again this year...  (My Movember Page).  That's fun, but a pretty passive thing really - I just need to not shave like I normally do for a month.  So, I'm also participating in NaNoWriMo again.

For those of you that don't know what NaNoWriMo is it stands for National Novel Writing Month and it's a month each year when people write an entire 'novel' in 30 days.  I have novel in quotes there because the criteria that makes a 'novel' for NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words.  It doesn't specify that your piece of literature needs to be good (thank God) or that it has to be complete.  It just needs to get to that word count.  A couple of years ago I participated and 'won', but I figured I'd do it again this year as I need to do more writing and it's a good way get things rolling again.

I'm posting this, not because I'm going to share what I write (not going to happen - it's just so bad already), but because I figure that I'll be more motivated to stay on track if I make my participation public.  When I did this before I did hit 50,000 words, but I never finished what I had started.  This was mostly because what I had written was so terrible that I just couldn't work on it anymore after I hit the goal.  This year I'm hoping for a slightly better result, but part of the joy of the exercise is the freedom to write absolute crap and not feel guilty or ashamed about it.

To anyone else out there participating in either Movember or NaNoWriMo - good luck and enjoy the crazy month! TWEET

 

Alex Crittenden