It’s that time again! (Or for those who have never heard of this: It’s that time!) That’s right, here in just a couple short weeks is NaNoWriMo time! What, pray-tell, is NaNoWriMo? Well it’s none other than National Novel Writing Month, if the title of this post has anything to say about it. So dust of your thinking caps and get your pens and computers ready; here is the breakdown of how this works:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

So that’s essentially it. You have to write 50,000 words in 30 days. For some of us, it’ll be a bitch and a half. For others, it may not actually be too bad. If you are curious, it breaks down to roughly 1,667 words per day, or the average college essay.

I had fully planned on doing this last year and then I just didn’t. There really was no driving force that made me not do it, but this year is different. I’m hoping to rock this to Russia, as it were.

So who is with me? Who will join the ranks of being a self made author in a month? WHO LUSTS FOR GLORY?! BRING IT.