Obligatory NaNo Post

Hey everybody!  It's National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  Naturally to a semi-professional (or am I fully professional now?) author like myself, every month is novel writing month.  But NaNoWriMo is still something special.

The basics, in case you don't know: in the 30 days of November each year millions of people around the globe attempt to write a full 50,000 words.  Basically, the ass bottom end of a novel's word count.  That comes out to about 1700 words a day, every day, which is a huge step up from most people's "eh, whatever I feel like whenever I feel like."  In my case I'd say in regular times I attempt to get something akin to 1000 words done every day, though it may be closer to every other day between research and procrastination.  So NaNo is a time of year when I double or possibly even quadruple my output.

So why do I bother if, as I said, I'm already a published, though admittedly not full-time author?  Well, mostly because it kicks my ass into gear and it's a good opportunity to bond with other people.  Everybody in the writing community either does NaNo, or has some kind of reaction to it.  I guess it would be like being a football fan and ignoring the Super Bowl.  Yeah, maybe your team's not playing, but you're going to have some kind of opinion about it.  It's a big fucking deal.

Now, for me personally NaNo has also been a source of great pride.  Here is a list of the novels that I have produced during NaNo (bearing in mind that, no, a novel is not complete at 50,000 words and before months and months of editing, but still, the bulk of each of these was done in November):

2009 - BRAINEATER JONES
2010 - THE GHOUL ARCHIPELAGO
2011 - BILLY AND THE CLONEASAURUS
2015 - HUNTER OF THE DEAD

And if all goes well after the next few years of editing, etc., I may just be filling out the gaps in that schedule with a few more books.  So, yeah, NaNo has been good for me in the past.

I know I'm more than a little behind on this post.  More than a little as in two weeks...or almost half the entire month.  But, yeah, as usual, I'm doing NaNoWriMo.  If we're not already buddies, definitely add me.

So where am I right now?  I'm at just under 24,000 words.  Tomorrow's goal is 25,000 (obviously, as that would be the halfway mark of both the month and the word count.)  So I'm just a scoche ahead of the game, maybe a little more than a day.  Normally by this point I like to be much further along.  There have been years when I've finished in under three weeks, and more than a few times I've jokingly suggested I should attempt NaNoWriFoNi and get it done in two weeks, but so far I've never been able to crack that nut.  Maybe one year when my schedule's a bit less hectic and I have time to prepare a manuscript to start come November.

How are you doing?  Playing along this year?  Or does NaNo disgust you, as it does any right-thinking wordsmith?