It's awesome. I repeat: It. Is. Awesome.
It is also very stressful. I'm not kidding.
For those of you who don't know what it is, NaNo WriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50 000 words (which roughly half to two-thrids of a book) in the month of November, which divides up to 1667 words a day. That's 1667 words a day, every day, for the entire 30 days of the month of November. It's sort of like a group community thing, because there are tons of people all over doing it too. So even if you don't know anyone else who's doing it (hi), you're not alone in the struggle.
It's a great way to simply force yourself to write. That's always the struggle: finding time to write. Well, problem meet solution: NaNo WriMo. It's a commitment, but it's worth it.
I just want to quickly take the time to reflect on my progress. I fell behind a day twice this month, having to make up for it either by binge writing the next day or by gradually writing catching up by increasing my minimum word limit each day. God, was that annoying. More often than not, I would start writing my daily chuck at 10:30pm. Yes, 10:30pm. I know that's kind of early for some people, but I'm not really a functioning being past 11:30pm. And seeing as it would take me until 12am, you got to wonder exactly how the heck I managed to write some actual quality stuff. Needless to say, heavy editing will be required eventually.
Actually, it's kind of funny. I started out writing a separate novel for the first three days, decided it was pure crap, and then started a new one. Then I worked my butt off on it for the next week, seeing as I had lost three day's worth of writing and thus had three day's worth of writing to make up for. Ugh.
But I made it through. I prevailed. I hit that 50 000 words. I learned so much from my characters. And I feel awesome.
That's kind of why I love NaNo WriMo.
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