November is National Novel Writing Month. I participated (and won!) in 2004, 2006 and 2008. If you noticed a pattern, then yes, I do it every even-numbered year and that means doing it again in 2010.

For the un-initiated, this means writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That’s 1,667 words per day. It’s a lot of work and the results can be pretty messy, but you end up with a novel. That’s cool. It’s about forcing yourself through the process and arriving somewhere at the end. It’s not about creating a perfectly polished product. It’s about diving in with a crazy but do-able plan and making it happen. Sometimes I think about applying the NaNoWriMo approach to other ventures.

Just like last time, I have no idea what I’m going to write. Not having an idea to percolate in the back of my head throughout October made things harder last time, so I hope I come up with something soon. Unfortunately, I keep catching myself coming up with weird ideas. Like exploring some strange new kind of storytelling (that kind of experimentation probably isn’t a good idea when you need to be cranking out 1,667 words every day like a writing machine) or turning this into yet another fundraiser (part of me thinks writing a novel when I should be paying the bills is foolish).

So we’ll see where NaNoWriMo 2010 takes us.