NaNoWriMo

Do you know it? A friend of mine told me of it a few years ago and I've decided that this year I will definitely do my best to participate. This will be hard work as I've got several other things I'm working on at the moment.... But keeping busy is better than staying idle, that's the truth of it.

If you don't know what it is you can visit the website here. Basically you spend the entire month of November to push out whatever piece of writing you've been putting off forever. You literally push it out like the child you never wanted.

Not too difficult, there are only the few rules below (copied from the site) that you must adhere to:

Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.

Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people’s works).

Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!

Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.

Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.

Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

With only two weeks to plan I have no ideas as to what I want to write. I've had ideas for short stories and fairy tales before but none of which have come to fruition. They say on the site that it's ok not to know what you're doing as you begin this quest. That's good because my "novel" is going to sound like a bunch of brainstormed gibberish for the first 160 pages I'm sure. Followed by three amazingly coherent pages and then the last twelve pages reading like a rogue keyboard having a seizure of sorts.

They say you're allowed to brainstorm an outline and develop characters so I guess that's what I'll have to do.... what a crazy idea... just a month of massive free-writing with hundreds of thousands of minds coming together to write and write and write some more. I gotta say. I like it.