It’s that time again.  National Novel Writing Month is upon us.  I will be participating this year.  I’ll be working on a partially complete novel that I need to finish – The Queen’s Man.  It currently sits at around 30,000 words, so if I hit the 50,000 mark for NaNoWriMo it’ll get me to a completed first draft.

NaNo is tough for me.  I write regularly, but not at such a fast pace.  Of the five years I’ve signed up for NaNo, I finished once, got about half-way twice, and dropped out on the other two tries.  November is a bad month for this because of Thanksgiving and my birthday.  I don’t write when I have company come and visit, and that typically happens most Thanksgivings.  So I’m usually playing catch up for those days.

Even though I don’t always make the word count, I like to do NaNo because it gives my writing a kick start and sets a faster pace for me to complete my writing project.

The downside to NaNoWriMo is that it has become commercialized.  If you sign up, you get bombarded with donation requests.  It used to be just a bunch of people getting together to write, but, well, money always gets in the way of a good thing.  So I try to ignore all the superfluous emails and write.

Give National Novel Writing Month a shot.  Even if you don’t “win”, you’ll have more words written than when you started.