Time to write a novel

Pick up your keyboard, my writers, we're going for a ride. November is here and along with it the InterNational Novel Writing Month - in one word, NaNoWriMo. If you haven't signed up on the website yet, you should. Click on this and it'll take you there.

If you've somehow never heard about it before, the NaNo event is pretty much what I described above - a month-long race to write a novel. Or, more exactly, to write 50.000 words. You get pep talks throughout the month, urging you on, hundreds of thousands of writers writing alongside you and a nifty stat thing showing you how much you've written every day, what your goal for the day is and how much you need to write to reach 50.000 by the end of November.

There's nobody looking over your shoulder to see if you've failed or won, so it's all just you, racing with yourself.

If you're a new writer who ever thought of writing a novel, this is your event: you can get all the support and hype to do it and get to the end!

If you're a more experienced writer, this is the time to sign up: you can get ahead on your project and learn how to have a daily schedule of writing to get stuff done.

If you're a new writer, just go for it. On my very first NaNo I didn't have a clue what I was doing, but by the end I knew my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. So will you. You'll face the challenge of actually going through the entire process and figuring out what you still need to learn.

If you're a more experienced writer, there's still a lot more to learn and pull through. I'd suggest planning ahead a bit and not going only for the word count, despite the NaNo philosophy of shutting away your inner editor for a month. But hey, maybe that's just me.

Good luck to you all and go forth and write! I send you off without a pep talk, but I'm sure that the enthusiasm will make you fly through the first pages anyway.

Let's do this!