Good morning, kids! It is now November First. I hope you didn't all party too hard last night and make yourselves sick from candy (or liquor), because -- should you choose to accept it -- quite a daunting task lays just ahead of you. Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, and you know as well as I do that that blinking cursor at the start of that blank white word document isn't just going to move itself along the screen.

What, exactly, is National Novel Writing Month? I'm so glad you asked. It was founded by Chris Baty up in the Bay Area back in 1999, just him and 20 friends and a pact to write in a frenzied mass.

Hey, those are pretty great reasons for writing novels, if you ask me. Anyway, the fun project grew, spawning a guidebook and becoming something of a movement. Last year saw over seventy-nine thousand registered participants, thirteen thousand of which crossed the proverbial finish line by the stated goal.

It's also, since its inception, grown into something bigger than itself, reaching out via the power of the interwebs to become a national (or international, really) rallying cry. At its most basic, it can be seen as a catalyst, adding the sort of motivation often lacking when given such a formidable open-ended task.

Perhaps even more importantly, it's a world of anonymous support, acknowledging -- and thereby hopefully banishing -- the "oh god, it's not really that great yet" train of thought, one of the biggest roadblocks to approaching a novel. The staff of Writing Month know that such a feat written in a month isn't going to be automatically publishable. (Unless you happen to be the Second Coming of Jack Kerouac. And even then that's up for debate. And if you are, drop me a line, will you?) Immediate full-on brilliance isn't the point here -- that's what editors are for. It's getting it done in the first place that matters most. All you need is a draft.

If nothing else, however, it's a fun and ambitious thing to do this month, in case you get bored just sitting around and waiting for turkey and pie (or tofu and pie, whichever). I'm not going to lie and say it's not that much to write -- I just went back and did a word-count on my "perpetual novel in progress," also known as the novella I wrote in my most successful college writing course ever. Eight thousand. Crap. Still -- check out the site, peruse the rules, and see if it interests you. Who knows: today could be the first day of the rest of your life as a writer.



_DictionaryGirl_ really ought to get around to finishing that novel...