Happy NaNoWriMo!

On the weekend, under the effects of a  sugar rush of Hallowe'en proportions, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, aka Crazy Writer Month. The official goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, or approximately 1667 words per day for a month.

I don't have time to write 1667 words a day. There is no way I can find time to write that many extra words every day, but an impossible goal has never stopped me from trying--or even succeeding.

So why am I doing it? I've been really focused on the non-fiction side of my writing life for a while now--queries, articles, editing other people's writing--and I thought this would help me take the plunge into the novel I've been kicking around in the back of my head. I'm hoping to shut off the inner critic for 30 days and just write...and write...and write...and at the end of it all, I will have a pretty good start to my novel, and a well-developed habit of writing a lot every day.

There's no finding time to write, especially not a novel which doesn't provide an immediate (or even a likely) cash payout. It's all about making time to write. And so it's easy for the love of writing to get buried in the to-do lists that fill our lives. NaNoWriMo is, for me, an opportunity to dig my love of writing out from under the pile of laundry, dust it off, and put it to good use again.