EEK! I am SO excited for National Novel Writing Month I can hardly think of words to express my, er… excitement! There are only FOUR more days!! I have heard people use SO many adjectives to express their thoughts about what NaNoWriMo is like. Crazy, impossible, amazing, unthinkable, ridiculous. What do I call it? Exhilarating.

Most of the time, my life nowadays is a routine. Day in, and day out, I go to class, I study in the library, I eat at the university dining hall, I study some more, I eat, and I sleep. Oh, and I blog. ;) I enjoy my days, but quite honestly they can get kind of monotonous after a while. I mean, eating the same shrimp scampi and vegetable soup from the same cafeteria every single day CAN get a little boring. Just a little bit. Sometimes, I feel like I just need to…GARRR!!!! Have some sort of wild frenzy and chaos.

That is exactly what NaNoWriMo offers. No wonder I’ve been addicted to it since 2006.

Thirty days. 1,667 words a day. One novel. Completely exhilarating. For every NaNoWriMo that I have participated in, it’s been just that. Creating plots, characters, settings, and gosh knows what else, and compiling it all together in a would-be coherent book is what NaNo is all about. With the clock ticking and my hands flying all across the keyboard from left to right, I feel extremely pressured…but in a good type of way. I feel like I can let go of some of my extra energy and stress and take a break from the monotony that inevitably dominates over my daily schedule. During the moments that I am writing, there’s nothing that is more alive to me than the story that I am creating.

Ahhh. Just thinking about it now and imagining all of this makes me anticipate NaNoWriMo all the more, if that’s even possible. And what’s even COOLER about this year is that I will be participating in weekly write-ins and meeting up with regional NaNoers for the first time. PLUS, I persuaded one of my best friends, Michael, to do NaNoWriMo with me!

So. Michael and I proposed a NaNoWriFri. Yes, National Novel Writing Friday. This Friday, we are going to go to our regional Kick-off Party at the local Panera, meet all sorts of cool NaNoers, and then plan our novels together at my apartment. See, I’m not completely done with the planning of my novel, and neither is Michael. (I blame the textbook reading and essays that I’ve had.) On Friday night, he will be coming over to my apartment and we will be having a sort of “prelude” to the frenzy of NaNo. We will be comparing plots, filling out NaNo charts and completing our novel outlines together.

NaNoWriMo is fun just by itself, but it is definitely 10x better when you do it with a friend! So if you don’t know anyone else who’s writing for November, let everyone know about this awesome competition you’ll be taking part in and try to get some of YOUR friends to do it with you! Especially if you’re a newcomer, you will definitely appreciate any inspiration and motivation from other people to keep on writing.

Ultimately, National Novel Writing Month is a competition with yourself. A competition to see how fast you can write your novel, how many words you’ll be able to get down on a day by day basis, and in the end if you got past your goal of 50k.

I found this cute comic from Google. It’s kind of fuzzy but if you drag it to your URL bar, you’ll be able to see it more clearly. I hope you enjoy! :)

~TRA