know are stocking their cupboards with coffee, chocolate,
and new pencils in preparation for NaNo (known to non-writers as
November). For those non-writers, NaNo
is the time of year where writers—always a bit on the quirky side—go completely
over the edge and attempt to write 50,000 words or a complete novel (whichever
is longer) in thirty days. Yes, I used
to do this. Yes, I won twice, and the
last year, wrote over 100,000 words.
Then came Florida
Hard to believe that I wrote in one month more than I’ve
written for the last three years.
Anyway, this time of year is a bit wistful now. I still open all the NaNo updates which
spatter my inbox, and I lurk the forums late at night when Hunter won’t sleep,
and I watch everyone else get excited about words and writing and 30 days of crazy
comradeship and I miss those days…
But I didn’t
intend this post to be an melancholy reflection on the past, but a hopeful
prediction for the future, and a giggle for today. For the future, I’ve decided this year that I
will do NaNo. No, I’m not going to try to write a
novel. I’m not even going to set a word
count goal. What I am going to do is resolve to write something every.single.day for
thirty days. No excuses. It doesn’t have to be fiction. Most of it won’t be, I expect. But it has to be creative writing of some
sort, and it has to be every day. And
now I’ve committed it to blogosphere and I would love to be nagged at for the duration of the
MonthOfCrazy.
And for the giggle…today I took my College Composition CLEP
exam. I was horribly underprepared due
to the insanity that has been October, and I didn’t realize until last week
that I had to write two essays, with only 30 minutes for each. I had only one day to practice, and only time
for two essays.
The first one was a disaster. I barely finished it in the time restraint,
and it was full of grammar and spelling errors and confusing verbage of all
sorts. I knew it wouldn’t even pass.
I sat down and had a quiet panic attack. Then suddenly the 30 rang a bell. This is
just like NaNo! As a quick insert
here—everyone does NaNo in a different way, but my preferred method is to write
out a very detailed outline, and then literally flesh out the outline. So, that’s literally what I did today. I NaNo-ed my way through my two essays. And although I made two stupid mistakes in structure (forgot to indent the first one and
forgot APA citing format on the second) I think overall the essays turned out
very well. Perhaps it’s just the 4 hours of sleep I’m running on, but I think
it’s absolutely hilarious and not a little bit plain and simple awesome that I
NaNo-ed a test.
So in conclusion to this very jumbled post…to all those of
you who are putting the finishing touches on your NaNo preparation, GO GET
THOSE WORDS! And please comment and let
me know what your November plans are!
Shirley Temple totally attended the parade. (Justine Bieber did too, but he was only cardboard.)