Have you noticed? On the sidebar to the right, under Old Nonsense and above Friends & Family blogroll. Yup, I signed up at NaNoWriMo. If anybody doesn’t know what it is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s an organization that promotes writing by challenging everybody to write a novel with at least 50,000 words in it during the month of November.

I found out about it only last year. I wanted to participate and started to squeeze my brain for characters and plot lines. I had nothing – nothing but smoke coming out of my ears. I still have nothing. I don’t know how I’m supposed to even start a thing like that. Plot lines? Nothing that is remotely similar to a plot line ever crossed my mind in my whole life. And characters? Yeah, fat chance I get an idea for any character, being the misanthrope I am. So when November rolled in, thankfully BEFORE my brain exploded, I still had nothing and I didn’t sign up.

Photograph by Ionushi, under attribution license

A few weeks ago, the chatter about this year’s NaNoWriMo started to show up here and there. Only thing I could add to that was I wish I could write or I wish I knew how to start or I wish I could come up with characters and plot lines and so forth. But the other day, Cylithria, who will be doing her 10th NaNoWriMo this November, told me that sometimes she just starts with one person, describing her boring job, etc without any other characters or plot lines in mind, just building on this one character. And the story just unfolds, sort of. The only thing is to write everyday. Well I thought, I can do that. So I signed up.

As far as I understand, you are supposed to start writing on the first of November, and by the end of the month, you are a winner if the word count of your novel is at least 50,000, whether or not the novel is finished. You are not supposed to edit it. You are supposed to just write, leaving typos and all kinds of errors untouched. By the end of the month, it’s supposed to be the first draft of your novel, and in the month of December, you edit it.

I’m encouraged to tell everybody that I’m going to write a novel so that I don’t quit. You know, it’s the same with everything. I mean the use of tactics that employs shame and embarrassment as the motivation to do something. Well, good enough for me. And I hope writing a blog post about it is good enough? Anyway, wish me luck. And if you are also participating, I’m yoonamaniac on NaNoWriMo. Buddy me up!